Quotes from Siobhan Creaton

seagull meetings' – according to one executive, because Ryan 'swoops in, shits on everyone from a height and swoops away again'.

He didn't mince his words and his language was fairly flowery. He said if they didn't like it they could fuck off

He suggests there are only three reasons why Ryanair might fail - 'nuclear war in Europe, a major accident o believing our own bullshit

The Aer Lingus board moved quickly to dismiss Ryanair's offer, which it said was 'unsolicited, wholly opportunistic and significantly undervalues the group's business and attractive long-term growth potential'.

If you raised a problem, there had better be a problem and you had better have a start, middle and solution to that issue. You didn't start something and expect him to fix it.

When friends asked how he was coping with his spectacular loss, he would say, 'I sleep like a baby – I wake up every ten minutes screaming!' He was advised on health grounds to take a holiday, so he went to his home in Ibiza and ran regularly on the beach. 'Someone asked me later how much I had lost. I said, "$300 million and 20lbs.

Ryanair had managed to strike a deal on eleven Boeing 737 aircraft that were all ten years old and had to put down $20m from its own coffers as a one-third deposit on the finance lease. The rest was to be paid off over the next five years with bank loans from New York, leaving the airline with fairly modest cash reserves. Ryanair,

More than a hundred new airlines went into business around this time, although the casualty rate was extremely high: in 1994 alone, fifty-seven new airlines opened for business, of which thirty-seven closed within two years.