O’Leary not green with envy
In fact, the airline boss won’t even be taking a seat on one of his own Ryanair planes to the Euro finals.
“Christ no,” he exclaims. “I’m just not interested in the Irish soccer team. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to take a seat from the real fans. It’s a selfless humanitarian gesture. Me, I prefer the rugby matches.”
Mind you, he admits he did once attend an Irish football match, back in 1995, an occasion which, much to his amusement in the retelling, is remembered for everything but the football.
“The only Irish soccer match I’ve ever been to was the infamous one against England at Lansdowne Road, the one that was abandoned. We had just started flying to Birmingham and we’d invited the Birmingham guys over. Those were the days, God help us. We got them tickets, a corporate package and they were all being very polite, saying ‘isn’t this great’. Next thing, the English start rioting.
“We brought the lads from Birmingham back into the corporate tent and Eamon Dunphy was doing the corporate gig. And he arrives back in as only Dunphy can: ‘This is a terrible slight on the English education system...’ When it was the cheap beer they’d been on all afternoon.”
In his usual informal style, O’Leary is addressing a press conference in Dublin about Ryanair flights to the Euros but, having failed miserably to pass myself off as an aviation correspondent — a tip: flapping your arms and making droning noises appears not to work — he tells me that, sadly, it’s not a good week for football questions.
For why? “We were launching a base in Palma on Monday night and when I was going out to dinner City were 1-0 up against Chelsea and hammering them and by the time I got back it was 2-1 to Chelsea.”
So you’re a Man City fan? “Life-long.”
Not a bandwagon jumper then? To his credit, O’Leary burnishes his credentials by reeling off some of the great Maine Road names of the 70s.
“I go back to Frannie Lee, Colin Bell, Mike Summerbee. The sad thing is that you could take great pride in being a City fan for years because they always ballsed it up. Now there’s no pleasure in being a City fan. I try to get over to about three games a year but even the tickets are harder to get now.”
Speaking of tickets, O’Leary bucks the consensus by insisting that there will be no great drought for the Green Army in Poland next summer.
“There’ll be no shortage of tickets out there,” he predicts. “In actual fact, I think we’re in a very good group from a ticket perspective because the Spanish don’t travel until they get to the quarters, semis, final; the Italians don’t travel and the Croatians won’t travel. So unless there’s a lot of Poles keen to go and see an Irish match, which I suspect there isn’t, there won’t be any trouble getting tickets.
“A lot have been sold and usually more surface outside the grounds as they always do at these tournaments. Go back to Giants Stadium in ’94. Who gets all the tickets? The bloody Paddies get the tickets because they’ll buy them outside the ground.
“What won’t happen this time around though, it won’t be like going to Stuttgart. The idea that they’ll all be driving camper vans across the roads of Poland — the roads of Poland will not sustain 18 hours in a camper van. The airport infrastructure is pretty good, the main cities are pretty good — outside of that, forget it. It’s a nightmare over there.”
The ostensible reason for O’Leary meeting the media, not that he’s ever short of one, is that Ryanair have announced their “same day soccer specials” to Poznan and Gdansk for the group games and, at €199 each way or €398 return, they can legitimately claim to be considerably cheaper than their rivals.
However, when it’s pointed out to him that the prices are considerably more expensive than the €30 or €40 it would normally cost to fly Ryanair to Poland, O’Leary adopts a wounded look.
“We’re doing this in the national interest,” he protests. “We’re out there supporting the team, putting on flights.”
Then his face creases into a grin.
“Look, are we going to make a few quid of this? Absolutely. We wouldn’t be doing this otherwise.”
Still, even if he can’t actually bring himself to watch Trap’s boys in the flesh, it’s nice to see O’Leary wearing the green shirt.
“Yeah, one that we bought about an hour ago,” he hoots, fingering the collar. “What? Have I to keep the label on? We’re going to try to return it? How cheap are we!”
But he does wish Ireland well, pipes up an assistant from the sidelines.
“Yeah, I do wish them well,” says O’Leary with a laugh. “Jesus, I’m very interested. I want to see them make it all the way to the semi-finals — in which case we get back into Poland again!”
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