Obituaries

First chief executive of Ryanair who fell foul of Tony Ryan

Eugene O’Neill’s flair for marketing failed to pare costs at the embryonic low-cost carrier

Eugene O’Neill was born into a prominent Dublin business family.

Sat Apr 21 2018 - 01:00

Born: March 2nd, 1956
Died: April 8th, 2018

In Siobhán Creaton’s history of Ryanair the company’s present chief executive Michael O’Leary delivered this comment about his first predecessor, Eugene O’Neill, who has died aged 62 following a long illness.

“He was a quite brilliant guy. He had gotten it [Ryanair] off the ground, he had great marketing panache, great public relations skills. He gave the airline an awful lot of credibility at a time when the airline was growing very quickly.”

However, in a remark which is suggestive of O’Neill’s flaws as a businessman, O’Leary added that “there was nobody focusing on costs”.

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The Ryanair chief was referring to the first three, turbulent years for the airline which has now grown to be Europe’s largest, from 1985-1988, when its administration was often teetering on the brink of chaos, with an as-yet non-computerised booking system, resulting in much unintentional overbooking, cancelled flights and infuriated customers.

O’Neill also had to deal with questionable and ruthless tactics by Aer Lingus, which fought fiercely to protect what had been its, and its partners, British Airways’, virtual monopoly of Anglo-Irish passenger air travel. Every time Ryanair threatened to take traffic from the two big carriers, such as the launch of its Dublin to Manchester route in 1988, Aer Lingus would slash fares – at that time about £200 – to match Ryanair’s audacious prices of under half that figure.

He was wonderfully inventive in marketing

O’Neill was ambitious for the new airline, initiating flights from the newly-opened Knock airport in Co Mayo to Luton and taking over slots from Luton to Paris (Orly) and Brussels and Amsterdam. He was wonderfully inventive in marketing, “celebrating” Aer Lingus’s 50th Anniversary in Ryanair’s first year of operation by publishing an advertisement showing a cake, with a segment missing!

However he, arguably, overstretched his young airline and losses began to mount spectacularly. Although by 1988 Ryanair was carrying 320,000 passengers annually, it was haemorrhaging cash, losing £3 million in 1987 alone.

This brought O’Neill into conflict with Tony Ryan. O’Neill wanted Ryanair to take Aer Lingus to the European Commission for breach of competition rules, but Ryan, for reasons that were never entirely clear, vetoed that idea.

In September he sacked O’Neill, in a manner widely seen as brutal and humiliating, and which led to years of bitter legal wrangling, as O’Neill sued for wrongful dismissal. In an affidavit to the High Court, O’Neill alleged that Ryan told him he would “crush and destroy him” if the action went ahead.

O’Neill also sued Aer Lingus and international aviation consultancy Transport Analysis International, but lost both cases in the High and Supreme Courts.

His subsequent career was erratic

Eventually O’Neill – who had also sued for breach of contract – settled with Ryanair, agreeing to give up his 7 per cent shareholding in return for his legal costs.

The episode had a devastating effect on his already fragile mental health. An as-yet undiagnosed sufferer from bipolar disorder, his subsequent career was erratic, combining at first success as a business consultant in Brussels and then a disastrous investment with another Irish businessman in Tanzania, where he contracted malaria, and had to be flown back to Europe accompanied by a nurse. Thereafter, his mental health deteriorated ever further, involving many spells in psychiatric hospitals.

It was during this period his life took a particularly catastrophic turn for the worse. One evening in 2006, in a house in south Dublin, during a psychotic episode, he attacked and sexually assaulted a young woman whose bedroom he had entered.

His subsequent trial and conviction in March, 2009, earned him a two-year jail sentence, despite pleas from, remarkably, his victim, that he should not be incarcerated, given his psychiatric condition. He was supported also in a Sunday Independent article by his old friend, Gayle Killilea, wife of property tycoon Sean Dunne. She argued that because of his mental frailty he could not be held responsible for his actions.

It was the most terrible end to what had started out as a brilliant business career.

He was educated at Synge Street CBS and Castleknock College

O’Neill was born into a prominent Dublin business family. His father, Hugh, was one of Ireland’s major building contractors while his mother, Breda, was a secretary and then homemaker. He was educated at Synge Street CBS and Castleknock College, qualifying with a B Comm and a first-class MBA from UCD. Thereafter he made such an impression while working in investment banking in Dublin that he was noticed by Ryanair founder Tony Ryan’s then personal assistant Denis O’Brien, later to become Ireland’s richest man.

He was O'Neill's brother-in-law, as O'Neill had married O'Brien's sister, Abigail. The marriage was later dissolved. O'Brien recommended O'Neill to his boss when Ryan was looking for someone to rescue his ailing investment in the Sunday Tribune newspaper in 1984.

O'Neill was appointed early in that year as managing director of the Tribune, only to leave after a few months following Ryan's acrimonious break-up with his then business partner in the enterprise, editor Vincent Browne.

Browne recalled O’Neill as “a quietly-spoken” colleague who got on well with the newspaper’s staff.

After a brief period back in banking, Ryan brought him back as his personal assistant and then, finally, as Ryanair’s first chief executive.

  • Eugene O'Neill is survived by his former wife and their three children, Sahra, Emmet and James. And by his siblings, Joseph, Sally, Hugh, Breda, Mary and Gráinne.
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