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RYANAIR BOSS MICHAEL O’Leary has accused Ireland’s transport minister Eamon Ryan of sending out the message that the country is “closed for business”.
Following a meeting between the two men, O’Leary said a failure to lift the passenger cap at Dublin Airport meant that airline business was now being sent to other parts of Europe.
Ryan said the “very good meeting” had concentrated on issues rather than personalities.
The meeting occurred one week after the airline executive launched a personal broadside against the minister in a row over passenger caps at the airport.
Last week, O’Leary said Ryan and tourism minister Catherine Martin were “dunces” for failing to act on the airline’s demands to remove the cap limiting Dublin Airport to 32 million passengers per year.
The Ryanair boss said the Green Party politicians should raise the passenger cap or leave politics.
Following their meeting today, O’Leary said: “We met for an hour, there wasn’t any meeting of minds.
“We are very critical of his failure as minister for transport implementing Ireland’s aviation policy, which is to grow traffic, grow aviation jobs and grow the contribution of aviation to the Irish economy.
“He essentially said to us he is not going to intervene in the matter of the Dublin Airport cap; he has this excuse that it would render the whole planning process in Ireland redundant.”
O’Leary added: “The sad result of this is that we are now sending aircraft, four aircraft that we had planned to base in Dublin this summer, are now gone to southern Italy and Poland.
“That is about two million passengers have been lost to Ireland, about 800 jobs have been lost.
“He has no solution for this for the next four years.”
He continued: “This is typical of what we get from Eamon Ryan, all talk, no action, no delivery.
“Eamon Ryan has essentially told us that despite the fact that his own aviation policy is to grow, he’s now telling us sorry I’m not going to take any action.
“Send the growth elsewhere, Ireland’s loss will be to the benefit of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece.
“Jobs, our tourism industry and aviation in Ireland is now capped. We’re closed for business.”
Ryan said the two men had disagreed over the passenger cap, but had more agreement discussing sustainable aviation fuels. Ryan said that lifting the cap would”completely undermine our planning system”.
He insisted that the planning process must be respected and that he would be breaking the law by intervening and removing the passenger cap.
He added: “To be honest, it was more about the issues than the personalities.”
Ryan said: “There were important things we needed to talk about, if it turns into a personal thing you miss the real story, which is in my mind how do we make aviation sustainable, and in his mind how do we get the airport working properly.
“But you can’t do that by breaking the law, you can’t throw out planning. We’ve lost so much in this country by people riding roughshod over the planning system.
“He thinks I can just go in and change the law, change the rules, change the conditions, you can’t do that, you’ve got to respect the planning system.”
Asked if O’Leary had apologised for his comments last week, and the publicity stunt involving cutouts of Ryan and Media Minister Catherine Martin, the Transport Minister said, “No, and I didn’t ask for one”.
Includes reporting from Christina Finn
I’d say O’Leary had to use all his willpower not to give Ryan a clatter. A well overdue clatter at that.
@Gerard Carey: wishing violence and retribution on elected officials. How very Trumpian of you.
@Name not provided: Trump.
2024.
@Gerard Carey: Wit less gom been.
Ryan is a farce. An absolute head the ball.
I’m with O’Leary on this one but he fails to understand that the decision is with Fingal County Council to increase the numbers cap not Eamon Ryan. Mr. Ryan is not the decision maker and has no jurisdiction to make the decision.. he can only influence the decision by way of a submission during the consultation stages.
@John Lee: it shouldn’t be. It is the largest piece of national infrastructure we have. And the most important. Legislation should be passed to put it under the control of the government of the day. Leaving it to Fingal, a council that wasted public money on a failed professional football team, is laughable.
@Alan OConnor: Stop whining, they’ll obviously grant it
This should have been on pay-per-view. Id enjoy watching O’Leary eat Hovis boy and husband band of equally weak advisors for a snack
@G: just broadcast it live on rte and we might have a reason to watch it for once
@G: I’m thinking it probably went the other way round. O’Leary went into a gun fight with a pea shooter. Perhaps threw a lot of bark and bluster, but ultimately was schooled on planning law and restrictions of power. His response after the meeting appears to point to this as all he can come up with is some meaningless soundbite that he repeated when he had his clownshow press conference.
@Sandra Molloy: Excellent comment! :)
@Name not provided: I”d say after Ryan’s attempt to persuade the electorate to vote yes in the referendum…O’leary had nothing to fear.
Where are all these tourists going to stay is the bigger issue. How much of our tourism revenue will be lost this year due to the governments failure to house asylum seekers and the homeless.
The only two reasons O’Leary is here is tax heaven, and workers being his useful tools. No strikes, no headaches. Look at Germany or France, he won’t stand a chance there. Here he feels he can control an intl airport.
@smatrix mantra: O’Leary is only bothered about profit, not those 30000 people that must contend with the DAA breaking planning laws for the sake of saving in fuel. Fungal CoCo must enforce its’ planning authority provided in line with the sanctioning of the north runway
Did O’Leary need to use story boards and sock puppets when he was dealing with aul eamo…..its impressive that he managed to keep him awake during the whole meeting too
O leary should have given him 160 free one way tickets to Haiti for them liars and con artists in leinster house
St Michael of the Air has a short enough memory when it suits him and his lust for profit. Listening to him, anyone would think the only airport in Ireland is in Dublin. Late St Tony Ryan might prefer to move the centre of ops from Dublin back to its cultural roots, Clare.
@Sean O’Callaghan:
O’Leary puts planes wherever there is a demand for them. If the demand was there at other airports he’d use them. He’s running a business not a charity.
O’Leary comes across as another wannabe bully boy.
And I am being overly kind.
@ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere: An arrogant plick, with enormous ego and wealth.
All in all, handy for a few soundbites but no substance– bit of a pointless meeting
800 jobs?? Your full of bluster nearly as bad as Ryan
@Johnny 5: At least now with the 800 job losses Ryanair are predicting they will be able to hand back all those houses in Swords they bought up, surely now if Micheal is right they won’t be needed.
@John Dennehy: Why would a business which purchased a job lot of houses hand them back? Sell them at a profit, sure. Hand them back? Just no.
@Antaine (aolbfs): agreed he won’t need them now apparently so sell them on to the highest bidder.
Everything O’Leary dies is totally self serving
The arrogance and entitlement of O’Leary. The limit was put in place for a reason. There wouldn’t be any point to planning conditions if we just scrap them as soon as businesses run up against them.
If anyone Michael O Leary should be laying the blame with the DAA who agreed to these planning conditions and failed to act sooner when it came to light they would be exceeded, instead, they decided to ignore the planning conditions and manipulate their passenger numbers and hoped no one would notice, it seems to be the typical incompetent attitude of most semi-state companies who think they are all above the law.
Ryan later found crying into his organic beverage and not just because the paper biodegradable straw went soggy…
In the photo there are two heads and one brain.
We ate an island. The next proposal from Ryan will be a grant to purchase Paddle Boats to travel off the island
If it is a choice between the two of them I’ll go with Eamo. At least he is interested in more than money!
Am not a supporter of the Green Party or Éamon Ryan, however the reality is that even if there was no cap on passenger numbers and Ryanair were allowed to bring in double the amount of passengers, there is no where for them to stay. Nearly every week in Ireland Hotels in every part of the country are being taken over by the government and used to accommodate asylum seekers.
This is having a devastating effect on the tourist industry all around the country.
Bord Fáilte can spend millions on advertising and media campaigns trying to attract tourists to Ireland but the reality is that we have a dwindling supply of accommodation for them.
This corporate capitalist assertion that if you’re not growing you’re dieing is a joke, we already have a booming tourist industry with the cap in place, it’s still going to be booming if the cap isn’t removed. O’Leary acting like he’s worried about Ireland’s tourism industry and job market when the only thing he worries about is his own profit margin.
Passenger caps are there for a reason. Dublin isn’t the only airport in the country, it’s time we started meaningfully investing in our other airports and cities instead of putting all our eggs in the one basket in Dublin.
Romantic Ireland is dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Net Zero and Eamo’s ambitions
Method
Working from home. Clear all office workers from Cities. Completed
Clear all Cars from Cities, work in progress.
Cap our Tourism, completed.
Pack ourHotels with refugees, completed.
Tax Fuel, Produce and people, businesses out of existence. Design a fine and penalties regime if not compliant. Completed
Net Zero results
Closed businesses
Closed Cafes,
Closed Restaurants
Closed shops
Deflated population
Net Zero a lot done with more to do. Eamon will be cycling around to a neighbourhood like your shortly to close anything that is still left operational.
The Greens &Net Zero. The Gift that Keeps on giving.
It’s almost as effective as Brexit for shutting down our economy.
Good man Eamo, keep it up.
You’re nearly there Net Zero employment!!
All scientific method modelling is based on the notion that experimental predictions are the same as astronomical predictions, even though they are two very different things.
“Rule III. The qualities of bodies that are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments are to be esteemed as the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.” Newton
That is the subculture restricted to theorists, and the idea that conditions in a garden greenhouse (experiment) scale up to the Earth’s atmosphere (universal qualities).
No offence to the two men at the centre of the topic; they are no better or worse than anyone else regarding a late 17th-century subculture and its awful presence as climate change modelling.
I don’t mind the monotones of mob comments.
@Gerald Kelleher: what is this nut job going on about.
Will that guy from Ryanair just pee off.
The only two people and their ideas that matter are Copernicus and Newton. The latter vandalised the main insight into a moving Earth in a Sun-centred system so theorists could assert experimental conclusions as facts. The conviction that conditions in a garden greenhouse scale up to the Earth’s atmosphere is an example of this modelling subculture.
Copernicus gives us the reasoning for a moving Earth-
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html
Newton vandalised it in a specific way.
“For to the Earth planetary motions appear sometimes direct, sometimes
stationary, nay, and sometimes retrograde. But from the Sun, they are
always seen direct[ly],…” Newton
Readers either see the Earth overtaking the slower planets or they do not, which is the difference between reasonable people and modellers.
@Gerald Kelleher: I guess we now know the answer to the question, what if you mixed LSD with glue and sniffed the whole bottle…..u get posts like this
@Tom Newell: brilliant
@Gerald Kelleher: But if you get the sum of Tan2A + Cos2B times the integral of 3I + 2Pie and chips, you’ll find that the earth is indeed as flat as 7up + 2IR! Strange? No?
@Gerald Kelleher: Whenever the Journal posts an article linking cars, cows, planes, and carbon to the Earth science of climate, it destroys the riches of Western astronomy and the reasoning behind a moving Earth in a Sun-centred system.
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011220.html
I see the Earth moving as it overtakes the slower-moving planets, whereas Newton and his many supporters here do not, as shown in the first post.
It all comes down to a misinterpretation of Kepler’s diagram of the Earth overtaking Mars over 16 years.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler#/media/File:Kepler_Mars_retrograde.jpg
Trusting experimental theorists with solar system and Earth science research is disastrous yet kids here are prepared to believe controlling human behaviour equates to controlling the weather.
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