| | Chapter 1 |
| | ITâS A LONG WAY FROM TIPPERARY |
Lyons Demesne, Co. Kildare, Sunday 14 October 2007
Everyone, including the man himself, had been determined that this day would not be a gloomy occasion. No expense or effort had been spared, and the weather, never the most reliable aspect of Irish life, had also more than done its bit. Under a bright autumnal sky, family, friends and admirers gathered at Tony Ryanâs country estate to say farewell. The setting was magnificent and one to which Tony had given so much of the later part of his life. When he took over the house a decade earlier it was in a state of decrepitude. Now lovingly and meticulously restored, it stood once again as a masterpiece of Georgian Ireland.
On the lawn beside the formal gardens, replanted by Tony to the original design, the hundreds invited to this memorial service stood reminiscing. Childhood friends mixed with the titans of Irish business, including Tonyâs exact contemporaries Michael Smurfit and Tony OâReilly, and his protĂ©gĂ©, the telecoms billionaire Denis OâBrien.
As guests moved towards the lake for the service, there came roaring low and fast over Lyons a spectacular flypast, led by a new Boeing 737 jet aircraft flying under the flag of the airline that Tony had founded in 1985 and that bore his nameâRyanairâaccompanied by a Challenger jet and a restored Stearman biplane. âMourners were left agog,â reported the Irish Times, âno doubt just as Ryan would have wanted.â
The lakeside service, held not far from the Clonaghlis graveyard at the edge of the Lyons estate where Tony had been buried, was characterised by warmth and humour. Tonyâs middle son, Declan, spoke movingly about his father. The eldest, Cathal, who himself would sadly pass away from rapid-onset cancer just months afterwards, perfectly imitated their fatherâs Tipperary accent. Shane, the youngest, read one of Tonyâs own poems.
Among the eulogies was one from Michael OâLeary, another of Tonyâs protĂ©gĂ©s and by now the high-profile chief executive of Ryanair. The relationship between the two had been both close and highly combustible. Yet whatever their tusslesâand they were legendâOâLeary was, says Declan Ryan, âlike familyâ. Perhaps the most touching signal of OâLearyâs respect that day was that, for the first time in as long as anyone could remember, he was wearing a tie.
OâLearyâs eulogy proclaimed Tony a âvisionaryâ and âone of the great Irishmen of the twentieth centuryâ. Here, he said, was a man who had lived up to Tonyâs fatherâs often-repeated aphorism that âit is better to wear away than rust away.â
Not that Tony was without his faults and even his failures: âTony Ryan wasnât perfect; he wasnât always right,â OâLeary reminded everyone. âTipperary is not the centre of the universe.â
It was a funny line and one that poked gentle fun at Tonyâs fierce and vocal pride in his native county. Yet, as OâLeary well knew, the one-liner was only half right.
Certainly part of the Tony Ryan story is the rise of a lad born in a backwater of an impoverished country that was itself on the periphery of Europe. Indeed, many would have said that Tony was a boy from nowhere; the man himself would have said that he was in fact a boy from somewhere. But, crucially, that âsomewhereâ was also the junction to somewhere else.
Limerick Junction in Co. Tipperary may have been not much more than a small village, but it was famous throughout Ireland and beyond. It was here that the DublinâCork and LimerickâWaterford railway lines crossed at an angle of 90 degrees. That gave it the sense of a place from where you could quite literally go places. The station was famous everywhere, says Albert Maher in Signalmanâs Memories, as âthe most extraordinary railway junction in the world.â Its unique layout comprised a long island platform with a range of bays and intricate points and switches. Trains arriving from any direction had to run clear of the station before making all kinds of complicated âreversingsâ in order to get to a platform.
The train coming from Waterford would begin this process at Keaneâs Points, where, on 2 February 1936, Thomas Anthony Ryan was born in the small railway cottage beside the signal box during the worst snowstorm that anyone could remember that century. With no cot in the house, he was tucked in the top drawer of a chest of drawers, which soon led to a long-standing family joke that he had been âtop drawerâ from the beginning.
Tony was the first child of Martin and Elizabeth (âLilyâ) Ryan, who had married the previous year. The couple had met in the station restaurant in Mallow, Co. Cork, where Lily worked as a waitress. They shared a love of amateur dramatics, and in 1932 they had played alongside each other in a production of T. C. Murrayâs melodrama Autumn Fire, put on by the Railway Menâs Dramatic Society of Limerick Junction. Later on, young Tony and his siblingsâCatherine, Simon, May and Kellâwould all be taught to recite by heart passages from Shakespeare, particularly Lilyâs favourite, The Merchant of Venice.
Martin Ryan was a Tipperary man from Solloghodbeg, near Limerick Junction. He was listed as being ten years old in the 1911 census, which also recorded his ability to read and write. When Tony was born, his father was a fireman on the railway, working out of Limerick Junction. He was a well-built, athletic man who played Gaelic football and hurling, winning the cup three years running for the local football team. Although he was a heavy smoker (Playerâs Navy Cut, because the sailor on the packet was often said to be modelled on Charles Stewart Parnell), Martin placed a strong emphasis on clean living. Sports were encouraged. There were frequent trips by train to the coast for long walks. He was a teetotaller and a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. âThe only bottle that would have been in the house contained holy water,â Simon Ryan recalled.
In photographs Martin always appeared smart and dapper. It left an impression on his children. Kell Ryan recalled that his father would only ever wear his work overalls once before putting them to be washed, which ensured that each day he left the house looking clean and pressed. It was a characteristic he passed on to his children, not least to Tony, who always took great pride in his appearance and later developed a taste for expensive handmade suits. In family photographs of the 1930s and 40s, whether informal or studio photographs for Confirmations and First Communions, the Ryans always looked well turned out. âWe may have been poor,â Simon remembered, âbut we never looked poor.â
Later, Tony would express frustration at self-made men who, like Dickensâs Mr Bounderby, loudly proclaim the depth of their childhood poverty. It was never a line that interested him. When pushed on the subject, he would briskly reply, âWe were a very wealthy family even if we did not have any money.â It was an attitude typical of the ârespectableâ working class. Martin was industrious and keen to get on, and his immaculately laundered overalls and the boots âspit and polishedâ to a gleam signalled an attitude to life, not just personal cleanliness.
Although the Ryan household was staunchly âTippâ, the matriarch at its centre was in fact a Cork girl. Lilyâs father had been the head gamekeeper in Longueville House, near Mallow. The family lived in the gate lodge until her fatherâs early death, when they moved back into the town. Later the Ryan children would spend the summers with their grandmother in Mallow, which was handily placed on the DublinâCork main line and allowed the family to take advantage of the cheap rail fares that were a perk of Martinâs job.
Lily remained a proud Corkwoman throughout her life. She was unafraid to stoke the traditional hurling rivalry between her home county and her new Tipp family. Simon recalled that she kept two garden gnomes at the front of the house, one painted red and white, which she called âChristyâ, after the great Cork hurler Christy Ring, and another in blue and gold, called âMickieâ, after Tipperaryâs Mickie âthe Rattlerâ Byrne, who lived nearby. âIf Tipp had won, Mickie Byrne would make a point of walking past the house and slagging my mother about Christy,â Simon remembered, âbut if Tipp werenât winning, or if Cork were, heâd be sure to choose an alternative route to avoid the gnomes.â
Lily could be formidable too. Kell even recalled her hitting his father over the head with a frying pan after a prank went wrong. This strong woman also had a quick and enquiring mind. She was an enthusiastic reader, mostly of Irish biographies, and devoured the Irish Press each day. Her politics, like Martinâs, were straight up and down Fianna FĂĄil: Ăamon de Valera was venerated; the Irish Independent was not allowed in the house. Lily would speak with great bitterness about the burning of Mallow in 1920. âIf we were watching âGone with the Windâ,â Kell recalled, âthe big scene with the burning of the plantation, sheâd say, âThat was Mallow. You should have seen the burning of Mallow.â It was typical Cork.â
Martin, on the other hand, talked little about the War of Independence. He had been involved with the North Tipperary Flying ColumnâDan Breen would later attend Martinâs funeralâ and each year he attended the commemoration parade on Easter Sunday. On these occasions his children would sometimes get a rare glimpse of the frustrations underneath as Martin raged at all the people marching, noting that if the Easter Rising had been as well supported in the first place there might never have been a civil war in Ireland.
In 1937, less than a year after Tony was born, Martin Ryan and his young family moved from Keaneâs Points to 83 Railway Cottage, a small but not unattractive single-level house beside the station. It had a scullery and three rooms, with a bellows by the fire in the front room. For young Tony the most exciting aspect of the house as he grew up was that he could climb onto the roof with his father to watch the meets at the Limerick Junction racecourse. It was the beginning of a love affair with horses that would last his entire life.
A mile and a half down the Limerick road was the local national school in Monard, where Tony began his education. Each day he would walk the three-mile round trip to the small school, which was run by two, sometimes three, teachers. A school photograph from the time shows forty-one pupils. Most of them look cheerful if not well off. Of the twelve children whose feet are visible, seven are not wearing shoes. Many of the childrenâs parents, like Martin, would have worked on the railway. All told, Tony and his classmates were typical and unremarkable for working-class children growing up in rural Ireland in the 1940s.
The first big upheaval in Tonyâs life came in 1944â5, when the Ryan family âemigratedâ to the cathedral town of Thurlesâhallowed throughout Ireland as the birthplace of the GAA. In many ways the move was a step down for the Ryans. The nice cottage in Limerick Junction was replaced with extremely cramped accommodation in an upstairs room at 45 Butler Avenue, with only a curtain to divide the children from the parents at night. The Ryans would remain here for five yearsâa struggle for two adults and five growing children. âIt was tiny, absolutely tiny,â Kell remembered. Martin applied to be rehoused by the council but was turned down. Tony later said that watching his father tell his mother the bad news was a heartbreaking momentâperhaps his first introduction to the harshness of life without influence or privilege. âTony always said it was this incident that drove his hunger,â his son Declan recalls.
For all the difficulties, the move from Limerick Junction was an important lesson for Tony in another way, even if he could not have articulated it at the time. He might have asked why his father had uprooted the family from the pleasant surroundings of their cottage for the inadequate accommodation in Butler Avenue. The answer was as simple as it was instructive: pure ambition. The reason for the move was that Martin had been promoted from fireman to engine driver on the railway. That move âupâ may in other ways have been a step down for the family; but for Martin Ryan it was the fulfilment of an aspiration that he had held all his life. And it was one that gave Tony a real pride that his father was now âsomeoneâ. For in 1940s Ireland few small boys were not attracted to the glamour and thrill of the life of the engine driver.
Years afterwards Tony would reflect on the excitement he felt travelling on the footplate of a train beside his father:
They stoked the gaping furnace with the poor wartime anthracite to build up the steam pressure and I was soon enveloped in that delicious childhood cocoon of excitement and terror, the red roaring furnace and the clattering steel and hissing steam and belching smoke coming to confirm my conditioned image of hell. But my father was there with his easy balance and [authority] and hell only could threaten. On the short journey to Gooldâs Cross the men put the driverâs cap on my head and pointed out landmarks and the farms of friends and talked about horses and hurlers. They even fried the traditional engine-driverâs breakfast on the long steel shovel, but I was not going to be distracted. I was a train driver. I was going to be one for ever. My grandfather was one. My uncle was a Station Master at Bruree. My family was on the railway. Trains were in my blood. Nothing would change.
That sense of direction, the confidence that in all likelihood he would end up on the railways himself, may explain why Tony as a boy did not seem particularly restless or ambitious. There are no stories of audacious moneymaking schemes or bold plans for the future. At Thurles Christian Brothersâ School he was a hard-working but quiet student. His mother later described him as âpurposefulâ, coming home in the evening and disappearing upstairs first to do his homework, then to head out to the field to play sports.
Returning to his school in 1990, when he donated a computer room, Tony would praise the Christian Brothers above all for teaching him, as his father had, about the need for a good work ethic in life. âThey demonstrated time and again that each of us, with encouragement and good example, can attain higher goals than we believed,â he told his successor pupils. âI feel a deep sense of gratitude to the men who dedicated their careers to me and my generation.â
In 1950 Martinâs risk in bringing everyone to Thurles finally paid off, when the Ryans moved to a smart new terraced council house at 10 Bohernamona Road (where the rival gnomes took up sentry outside). They were living in a more spacious house with front and back gardens and neat little steps on the path leading up to the front door. Tony, as the eldest, finally got his own bed.
The move marked the beginning of a happy period in the familyâs life. The children were settled at their schools, the girls going to the Presentation Convent. First Communions and Confirmations were made at Thurles Cathedral. Although no-one was too religious or had any special vocations or devotions, the boys joined the confraternity, and the girls were in the Legion of Mary.
Tony was also an enthusiastic scout, which gave him his âfirst experience of leadership and the right kind of disciplineâ. He âadoredâ the camping and long route marches as well as the âthrillâ of becoming a patrol leader.
There was sporting success too, with Tony winning a county minor football medal with Thurles Sarsfield, although, in true Tipp fashion, he always preferred hurling. His friend Margaret Downes remembered how at parties he always âhad a transistor to his ear listening to the match and oblivious to what was going on around him.â Years later pilots in Tonyâs employ would get used to the request made in far-flung places to find out the hurling score.
School holidays in Ireland were longâfrom the end of May to the beginning of Septemberâso over the summer months Tony and his brothers brought some extra money into the house by âfooting the turfâ for Bord na MĂłna. Early each morning a truck would pick the boys up in Thurles to take them out to the bog. There they would board a narrow-gauge âbog trainâ that would transport them three or four miles out. A foreman would give each a âspreadâ to cutâpayment was by the spread, however long it took. âIt was brilliant craic,â remembered Simon, âfive or six daysâ work would mean a guy taking home around three pounds, ten shillings a weekâgood money in those days.â But they had to work for it. âThis was literally backbreaking work,â Kell recalled. âI mean you were stooped down all the time, getting things off the ground, back up again. Nobody had gloves. The wind would be blowing, or sometimes youâd get sunstroke.â Tony would later reflect that, for all the ups and downs of life in business, âI always thoug...