‘Typical Ryanair’ is a well-worn phrase, but why do we take so little pride in the Irish airline?

Perpignan airport in French Catalonia could not be more different from London’s Heathrow. It is small, hardly more than one room and is located on a sparse plain in view of the Pyrenees. There is no high-speed train to a metropolis like London. It services about seven incoming flights a day (two of which are Ryanair) – compared with Heathrow’s 650. Border patrol is managed by two surly Frenchmen. And crucially it is rarely the locus of mass air travel disruption.

Meanwhile, Heathrow has become the poster child of post-pandemic travel chaos: lost luggage, overcrowding, lengthy delays. And this week it reached an apogee. Thanks to a systemwide failure in UK air-traffic control services on Monday, flights in and out of the country were grounded. Flights over UK airspace were diverted. By day’s end, 1,200 were cancelled. And though the fault itself was quickly resolved, it proved the behemoth airports like Heathrow and Stansted cannot help but suffer the domino effects. Tuesday saw more cancellations and increasingly aggrieved passengers sleeping on terminal floors. And so once again – as is becoming the norm – the UK was beset by chaos. And it became the rest of Europe’s problem too.

Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, issued a candid apology. “We had a very difficult day yesterday,” he conceded, having to cancel about 250 flights on Monday (affecting 40,000 passengers), and a further 70ish on Tuesday. “It’s simply not acceptable that UK NATS [National Air Traffic Services] would allow their systems to be taken down,” O’Leary seethed. And fairly so: the systems failure coinciding with one of the busiest travel days of the year has resulted in the worst day for UK air travel since the Icelandic volcano eruption in 2010 clogged European skies with thick clouds of ash.

But in the course of the disastrous day some emerged unscathed. I was among the lucky few: in spite of everything, Ryanair efficiently (and very cheaply) got me to Perpignan airport on Tuesday morning. Perhaps this is why I am so well-disposed to the carrier today. But – even after O’Leary’s apology – we ought to remember Ryanair’s track record. In the first half of 2022, the airline cancelled 0.3 per cent of its flights – making it the best-performing on that metric worldwide. Meanwhile, as of last summer, British Airways was the worst-performing UK airline – with a cancellation rate of 3.5 per cent during the first six months of 2022 according to data by air travel intelligence company OAG. You were 12 times more likely to have had a BA flight cancelled than a Ryanair one. My sense that Ryanair is a friend is not just a sense – it’s written in the data.

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But it is – evidently – still all too easy to sneer. “Typical Ryanair” has become a clarion call for Ireland’s middle class. Perhaps the haughtiness directed to the carrier is driven by aesthetic snobbery: the garish blue-and-yellow branding is an assault on the senses after all. The plasticky interiors of the planes, thinly cushioned seats, the sardine-like internal structure hardly scream “expensive”. The tinny trumpet that sounds every time a flight arrives on time is annoying (who else gets a self-congratulatory ditty when they perform the basic requirements of their job?) And then there’s the broad-stroke disinterest in the passengers’ quality of experience.

Sure. All of these things are true. And of course we can listen to every anecdote about the time they charged too much for a bag and flogged unnecessary flight insurance and expensive meal deals. But the services remain remarkably cheap: a study by the Times of London found Ryanair coming in as the cheapest option in 71 per cent of cases, including ancillary fees. And, at the end of the day, we simply cannot expect to pay McDonald’s prices for dinner at Chapter One. I could book a flight from Dublin to London next weekend right now for £15/€17.45. For that price, we should tolerate some of the Spartan conditions.

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So why do we take so little pride in the plucky budget airline? Neither its low cost nor its reliability seem sufficiently powerful to turn the brand into a national treasure. Perhaps its sheer scale will force us into accepting its influence: it is now the most used airline in Europe, sometimes transporting tens of millions of passengers across the continent each week. In May, Ryanair announced an order for a further 300 aircraft from Boeing – this will nearly double its passenger capacity over the next 10 years.

More than any of that, Ryanair has been central to the proliferation of Irish soft power. As a pioneer in affordable air travel, it has opened up the continent, having a sculpting force on the social fabric of Europe itself. It has – as Martin Vander Weyer argues in the Spectator – “smashed state carriers’ cartels”. And all of this for fares frequently cheaper than a train ticket from London to Manchester, and a trip more convenient than the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead.

Ryanair has legitimate claim to being among the greatest Irish brands – like Marks & Spencer’s to England; Toblerone to Switzerland; Ikea to Sweden. It can be hard to see that when stuck in a melee of air traffic control systems failures. But its record tells another story.