I was out of the country when Tony Ryan died after a long illness, borne with serenity, writes Garret FitzGerald.
I know that immediately after his death many people wrote and spoke about him, but I would like, even belatedly, to add some words of my own, for I got to know something of his extraordinary qualities at first hand when I served on the board of Guinness Peat Aviation between 1987 and 1992.
In the mid-1980s Aer Lingus was no longer providing the kind of competitive service that it had offered in earlier decades, and few foreign airlines were serving Dublin, or indeed any part of Ireland. As a result tourism was suffering from the excessively high cost of air travel and the potential for home visits by emigrants and for their relatives in Ireland to visit them abroad was not being tapped. Even business travel was being constrained by the cost of air transport.
So when in 1986 Jim Mitchell, then minister for communications, proposed to me that Ryanair be authorised to compete with Aer Lingus on cross-channel routes, I felt that I could not allow personal sentiment, arising from the 12 years I had spent with that company during the late 1940s and 1950s, to sway my decision. I just had to hope that, faced for the first time with real competition, Aer Lingus would make itself more cost-conscious and efficient. If so, the consumer of air transport would be better served by the availability of two efficient airlines.
After my resignation as party leader following the change of government in March 1987, I was pleasantly surprised to be approached on Tony Ryan's behalf to invite me to become a director of his aircraft leasing company, GPA. I was delighted to have the chance to become re-engaged with an aspect of aviation different from that with which I had earlier been involved.
The aircraft leasing operation that Tony Ryan ran at Shannon was unique. He had collected a brilliant team, and he worked them unmercifully hard. Wherever they were in the world during the week, busy leasing aircraft, they had to be back in Shannon for the Monday morning management meeting, to review performance and tactics.
But Tony was such an engaging, stimulating and hands-on boss, with so much vitality and imagination, as well as a mischievous sense of humour, that they accepted this extraordinary regime. And with the participation of directors such as Nigel Lawson, Peter Sutherland and John Harvey-Jones, board meetings could also be lively affairs.
As a director I had to fly with Tony to countries like Hungary, India and Russia - the latter being then in the process of glasnost and perestroika. On our Indian trip we arrived in New Delhi at 7.30am, and, after meeting the prime minister, we were to leave late that evening. But my chance to impress friends with the story of my day-trip to India was spoilt by a request from Rajiv Gandhi that I stay on after the rest departed, so that next day I could meet one of his ministers!
In Moscow with Tony, I sat at lunch beside the managing director of Aeroflot and took the opportunity to ask him how many aircraft his company operated - to which, as I expected, I received no reply.
What prompted me to quiz him about this was that 40 years earlier, in February 1949, I had written the lead article in News Review(at that time the British equivalent of Timemagazine) about Aeroflot's fleet, pointing out that it was then the largest civil air fleet in the world.
I had laboriously calculated the number of aircraft from a timetable that Aeroflot had released without perhaps realising just how much about the airline could be learnt from such a document.
On these trips I became fascinated by Tony, who had both an enormous range of interests and an extraordinary capacity to think imaginatively. Of course some of his wilder flights of fancy had to be shot down, such as the idea of a super-airport for cargo near Portlaoise! But it was, of course, his imagination, combined with his extraordinary courage, that gave him an advantage over so many business leaders.
He also had a remarkable aesthetic sensibility, which enabled him to become a wise and generous patron of the arts. That quality led him to restore, and to decorate and furnish magnificently, Lyons House near Newcastle, Co Dublin, and to create a most beautiful setting for this wonderful building - where a moving memorial service for him was held last Sunday afternoon.
In 1992 GPA set out to raise £1 billion capital with which to finance its purchase of 10 per cent of all new civil aircraft. The unexpected failure of this public offering led very quickly to the demise of the company. Tony took this huge setback calmly, although it could have destroyed a lesser man. And, rising from the ashes of GPA, Phoenix Ryan went on to new successes.
While GPA had disappeared, many of those who had acquired very specialised skills there either found employment in other aircraft leasing firms or established their own companies to engage in this activity. So, in a different form, Tony Ryan's vision of Ireland playing a key role in this specialised financial sector was sustained.
But an even more remarkable legacy of this extraordinary man was the emergence through Ryanair's initiative of what is fast becoming global low-cost air travel. For Ryanair, and new airlines following its lead, are now transforming the lives of tens of millions of people throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas, enabling far-flung families to stay in contact with each other; young people to see parts of the world to which they would not otherwise have had access; and less well-off people to take holidays they could never previously have imagined possible.
Before it became viable Ryanair went through difficult times but Tony stuck with it until it eventually became a very profitable company - the example of which is now being so widely emulated. And, as I had hoped would happen, Aer Lingus has survived Ryanair's competition, and is currently seeking to re-invent itself in turn as another low-cost European airline.
It was Tony Ryan who showed us how to transcend Ireland's geographical isolation, enabling us to re-integrate Ireland economically and socially with the land-mass from which it was cut off by the sea many thousands of years ago.