Michael Clifford: Is O'Leary taking the Mick with his Covid-19 diagnosis? 

Michael O'Leary was making the rounds again this week, rubbishing Nphet's stance and promising to fill skies once the over-50s are vaccinated. He is eyeing the bigger picture with his wild claims 

Michael O'Leary, speaking in 2018: 'I don’t accept that climate change is real.' File picture: Press Association

You people. When are you going to realise that this whole Covid pandemic thing is being blown out of all proportion? When are you going to stop tuning into the daily dose of misery on the national broadcaster?

Why don’t you stop listening to the misinformation coming out of Nphet and that guy Tony Holohan?

And as for those people advocating for a zero-Covid plan? Idiots. Every one of them. Idiots.

All that is required for normality to resume is for the Government to get the finger out.

Anyone over the age of 50 must be vaccinated by June, and thereafter restrictions can be lifted. The skies once more will be filled with the sound of moneymaking.

Jab and go, that’s where your hopes, your dreams, your connectivity lie.

You can pack up your trauma and bereavement and simply hop on the next Ryanair flight to the sun, where you will be joining millions who are heading for a summer holiday on the beaches of Europe.

And by the way, anybody who tells you that they have not received a refund from Ryanair for their cancelled flights is a liar.

So goes the story of the pandemic according to Michael O’Leary.

The Ryanair chief togged out earlier in the week and took to the airwaves with his oversized boots. He tore lumps out of anybody he perceived might be affecting the share price of his company in the course of their work or in exercising their rights.

Over the years, there has been a particular type of bore in this country who would tell you that the only person who could sort out the health service was Michael O’Leary.

For Michael O’Leary, there is a price to his reputation in adopting the stances that he does on the Covid pandemic and climate change. File picture

So it was no surprise that in his interviews this week, Mickser provided the benefit of his expertise in public health.

Holohan, he said, is not doing his job properly and Nphet is “trying to terrify the population” with its daily press conferences.

If the over-50s are vaccinated by June, there will be no need for restrictions. That is the airline chief’s expert opinion.

“There will be a dramatic reduction in Covid hype once everyone over 50 is vaccinated,” he said.

Everything will be sorted when “the Government and Nphet get the finger out”, he added.

When he was asked if anybody who claimed not to have received a refund from Ryanair for their cancelled flights was not telling the truth, he said that was correct.

Over on Newstalk he let fly on other targets, including the growing body of opinion advocating for a zero-Covid plan, whom he described as “idiots”.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Joe Duffy’s Liveline that same afternoon heard from a succession of people — both members of the public and travel agents — who were still owed refunds of up to €200,000 from Ryanair for cancelled flights.

Duffy cast his programme as a pop-up commissioner of oaths office, where callers came to swear the truth that O’Leary had claimed were lies.

As for the Government getting the finger out — well, yes, there were calls for that this week. Except the calls largely concerned the Government’s failure to swiftly and properly implement a full quarantine regime for those entering the country.

The prospect of such a quarantine move would surely horrify O’Leary as it would add a further blow to air travel right now.

The whole tenor of his tirades this week suggest that the airline chief is getting seriously frustrated at the impact the pandemic is having on his life’s work — that being the ascent of the fortunes of Ryanair.

Aggression has always formed part of O’Leary’s business persona, but a virus is not like your average opponent, airport manager, or government minister. Raging against the thing is as useless as lashing out at an inanimate object or the weather.

So O’Leary has to stick the boot in with no real target, flailing in all directions, because the actual source of his frustration is beyond the reach of his business or public relations acumen.

Despite the poor man’s apparent shock, the reality of the situation is that Ryanair will probably come out of this pandemic stronger.

As with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 economic collapse, the airline, under O’Leary’s stewardship, is in a great position to weather the storm while many opponents go to the wall.

So Mickser will still be king of the castle.

But, as usual, he is eyeing the bigger picture and that is probably the real source of his frustration.

There is every possibility that one outcome of the pandemic will be a reduction in air travel.

Once it’s over, will everybody be as likely to hop on a plane again?

Certainly, business travel is going to be hit. The ease with which teleconferencing and online meetings have become a feature of life over the last 12 months is bound to catch on over the longer term, to a greater or lesser extent.

The question then arises as to whether any cultural shift in air travel post-pandemic will accelerate the climate change agenda, which insists that we must fly less in order to reduce emissions.

Should that ethic take hold, and it is almost inevitable that it will at some point, the days of exponential growth for Ryanair will be over.

One passenger wearing a face mask at the Ryanair ticket desk in an empty Dublin Airport over the Christmas period. File picture: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie

Naturally, O’Leary doesn’t believe in climate change. How could he when efforts to tackle it would have a devastating effect on the Ryanair share price?

In 2018, O’Leary informed RTÉ’s Damien O’Reilly that the cooling and warming of the planet had been “going on for years”.

“I don’t accept that climate change is real. I don’t accept the link between carbon consumption and climate change,” he said.

It’s bad enough that the science on climate change is going to impact Ryanair’s share price, but now the Covid-19 pandemic looks like it might accelerate the decline of air travel. That’s a sufficiently dark vista to get under the skin of any airline boss.

For O’Leary, there is a price to his reputation in adopting the stances that he does on the Covid pandemic and climate change.

He has long been regarded as a brilliant businessman, a visionary, and a man who gets things done. 

However, now he feels compelled to sing from a hymn sheet that is sweet music to the ears of the kind of conspiracy theorists who portray the lockdown as a power play and climate change as one giant conspiracy.

Mickser isn’t a conspiracy theorist. He’s just a businessman using all the tools at his disposal to turn a buck.

However, when he chooses to spout the kind of garbage that those people want to hear, it is inevitable that they will pounce on it.

As such, poor old Michael O’Leary is in danger of becoming a poster boy for nut jobs.