Business: Adam Smith is widely regarded as the prophet of free-market economics, and rightly so. Smith praised capitalism but did not trust capitalists, whose goal was to fleece anybody who came their way. Happily, he believed, the market had the power to convert their greed into a better world for all.
What would the timid Scotsman have made of Ryanair's Michael O'Leary? One suspects that he would not have warmed to the self-proclaimed "obnoxious little bollocks" from Mullingar, but that he would have lauded his perseverance and willingness to take risks. Smith would also have urged him on in his battles against the powers-that-be as he "made Ryanair take off".
Journalist Alan Ruddock's biography is emphatically not a rags-to-riches story: its subject's background is Clongowes ("in a f***ed-up way I was nobody at school"), and Trinity College Dublin (where he "learned very little"). While an undergraduate at Trinity, O'Leary lived in a family-owned apartment and had enough pocket money to afford a "babe magnet" purple Mini.
After summers working behind the bar in an uncle's hotel in Mullingar, O'Leary's first real job was as a trainee tax accountant. That would have made him rich in time, but he "wanted it faster", and so his entrepreneurial career began with the purchase of a newsagent's shop in Walkinstown. The shop was open 16 hours a day on the basis of "treble your turnover, treble your money".
Not even Christmas Day was a holiday; later O'Leary would brag about charging the people of Walkinstown three times the normal price for batteries and chocolates on a Christmas Day. Soon he could afford to buy a second shop in Crumlin and a share in a third in Terenure.
Having cut his teeth on corner shops, in 1988 O'Leary turned to Tony Ryan, whom he had met (and impressed) while a trainee accountant. Ryan, then near the peak of his success as chief executive of aircraft-leasing company GPA, hired O'Leary as his personal assistant. As a former Aer Lingus employee, Ryan had seen the potential for an Irish low-fares airline quite early on. His abortive plans for an airline to be called Irelandia in 1980, revealed to Ruddock, clearly show this.
He founded Ryanair, which would soon become synonymous with O'Leary, as a bequest to his three sons in 1985. Ryanair began as a tiny operation, running a 15-seater between Waterford and Gatwick, a "pipsqueak airline . . . going nowhere", according to a family friend. Next year two ageing Viscounts were leased to ply the Dublin-Luton route. The early years were not very promising, and one of the ironies of O'Leary's career is that, as financial adviser to Ryan, he urged his boss to close an airline that had lost £2 million in its first year, or else sell it off to Aer Lingus. Tony Ryan stubbornly refused, and the rest is history.
The Ryanair "idea", less about innovation than imitation, was not rocket science. It took off after Tony Ryan sent his assistant to Texas to meet Herb Kelleher, co-founder and chief executive of Southwest Airlines. Kelleher was already widely known in the US for running a highly successful, no-frills, low-fares airline. His cost-cutting innovations included relying on smaller, out-of-the-way airports; open seating; no "free" meals or drinks; and running a fleet of identical planes (Boeing 737s). Sound familiar?
Southwest also had a flair for aggressive marketing, typified by its "Liar, Liar: Pants on Fire" advertising campaign against a rival carrier in 1992. To be fair, the idea of cheap air travel for the masses goes back further than even Southwest: Kelleher had been inspired by the success of Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA, which later merged to become US Air), and had copied several of their ideas - including, it is said, their mini-dress cabin crew uniforms.
WHAT KELLEHER MADE of his 31-year-old Irish guest is not recorded; given how closely Ryanair was modelled on Southwest, O'Leary's recollection that he drank too much bourbon to remember a thing next day is probably (to use an O'Leary-ism) bulls**t. One message that clearly did not sink in, however, was Kelleher's insistence that happy customers and profitability were compatible.
Southwest prides itself on being subject to proportionally fewer customer complaints than any other domestic airline, and the hard-drinking, larger-than-life Kelleher still holds that "we're in the customer service business, and we happen to operate an airline". Corporate priorities remain "employees first, customers second, shareholders last".
One wonders whether O'Leary's contrasting stance - exemplified by his attitudes to customers who say their granny fell ill ("What part of 'no refund' do you not understand? You are not getting a refund, so f*** off"), and to Ryanair's millionth passenger, whose prize of "free flights for life" he tried to renege on - might not be counterproductive. Ryanair's über-frugality and surly staff - the conviction that "nice costs money" - make it the "the world's least favourite airline", the airline its millions of users love to hate.
Ruddock does a good job of telling the Ryanair story, although it must be said that he covers very much the same ground as Siobhán Creaton's highly successful Ryanair: How a Small Irish Airline Conquered Europe (Aurum, 2005), which has already sold more than 20,000.
The forte of both books is interesting anecdotes, many based on undated and undocumented interviews. They give the lie to O'Leary's own tongue-in-cheek verdict that "business books are bulls**t and are usually written by wankers". Ruddock is much too kind to his subject, however, and while his is not an "official" biography, it is not "unauthorised" either.
Ruddock offers ample evidence of the qualities that got O'Leary where he is - hard work, a ruthless streak, high self-esteem, care for detail, more hard work - and of the feistiness and outspokenness that make him such a media magnet.
O'Leary's loutish and foul-mouthed side is not ignored: passengers are "buggers" (a term of endearment in Mullingar, says O'Leary), his employers at SKC were "the greatest f***ing gobs**es", Aer Rianta is "the Iraq of Irish tourism", EU commissioners are "f***ing Kim Il-Jungs" (sic). Elsewhere O'Leary has referred to travel agents as "f***ers who should be taken out and shot", Brussels as "an evil empire" led by morons, British Airways as "expensive bastards", and the British Airports Authority as "overcharging rapists".
WHILE THIS IS a book that celebrates success, it comes at a time when the future for Ryanair is less rosy than before. Quite apart from the possibility of carbon taxes reducing the demand for air travel in general, Ryanair is now on the receiving end of the sort of competition that it pioneered more than a decade ago. So much so that its main rival, Easyjet, has edged ahead of it in terms of turnover and often offers better deals.
The number of would-be Ryanairs continues to grow, while the traditional airlines have also become adept copycats. On a casual comparison of fares for a week-long Dublin-Barcelona round trip the other day, Aer Lingus was charging €150 less than Ryanair; and that did not take account of the added expense of commuting from "Barcelona-Reus" or "Barcelona-Girona" (both more than 100km from the city centre). And so, Ryanair has been reduced to ever more penny-pinching and stealthy extras-baggage charges, Ryanair specials such as "PSC - Non-Refundable" (passenger service charge) and "Ins & Wchr Levy" (insurance and wheelchair levy), and even a prohibition on ground staff recharging their mobile phones on airline premises.
Adam Smith was right. Ryanair has benefited us all, and especially those who prefer other airlines. But there is a final irony: had Ryanair and Aer Lingus joined to form a monopoly a few months ago, O'Leary would be back again to fleecing Irish customers, like those Christmas Day shoppers in Walkinstown long ago.
Cormac Ó Gráda is professor of economics at UCD. His two most recent books are Ireland's Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Dublin, 2006) and Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton, 2006)
Business: Michael O'Leary: A Life in Full Flight By Alan Ruddock Penguin Ireland, 439pp. €16.99