Like many people who watched the now-infamous recording, shared by the Westmeath Examiner, of Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary disparaging teachers at a campaign event for Fine Gael’s Peter Burke, the thing that primarily struck me was not so much the content of his speech as the reaction to it.
The remarks themselves – that the Dáil was “full of teachers”; that this was a group he wouldn’t generally employ to “go out and get things done”; that people with private-sector business experience should be running the country, etc, – were hard to get particularly worked up about. They were the sort of mildly spicy business platitudes that for some reason pass for no-nonsense provocation when delivered by Michael O’Leary.
If I had to guess, I would give O’Leary the benefit of the doubt and say that he wasn’t actually trying to be funny. But I could well be wrong, because to judge by the reaction from the crowd, you would think they were watching Lenny Bruce tearing the roof off Carnegie Hall in 1961. At the mere mention of teachers, the audience was already hooting with derision; by the time O’Leary delivered the comedic coup de grâce about not employing teachers to go out and get things done, they were in the grip of a rising paroxysm of pro-business hilarity.
The scene was, in a sense, a dramatisation of an old set-piece of Irish political life: the idea that, if only we had the likes of O’Leary running the country, we’d all be a lot better off, just like Ryanair’s shareholders have been better off under his reign as chief executive.
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This fantasy is based on two obviously flimsy ideas: that running a country is basically the same thing as running an economy, and that running an economy is basically the same thing as running a publicly traded company. O’Leary’s short speech – which, at its full five minutes, doesn’t contain much more substance than the bit about teachers that captured the public’s attention – is mostly animated by enterprise-friendly incantations about “getting shit done” as an antidote to the left-wing “tax and spend” approach to government, as though the idea that you should tax citizens and then spend that money on public amenities is some kind of unrealistic leftist shibboleth.
The main examples O’Leary brings to bear in his speech are worth considering here. “We’ve learned from security huts at the Department of Finance, and bicycle sheds on the lawns of government buildings, that actually tax-and-spend is not the way forward.” Have we, though? Or have we learned from these – both of which engineering projects of Promethean scale and ambition were undertaken while the party he’s telling us to vote for were in government – that this party has little control over its own public expenditure, and even less sense of what it should prioritise that spending on?
For all that he has cultivated a reputation for cutting through the waffle and talking common sense, O’Leary’s public pronouncements tend, as with so many of his fellow business-casual savants, to be extremely vague and airy. You can get away with an awful lot of hand-waving, it seems, as long as you first make a big production of rolling up your shirtsleeves. And so it was with the implication that government inefficiency had to do, somehow, with the number of TDs in the Dáil whose background was in the teaching profession.
As flimsy as this notion was, it clearly went down exceptionally well with the Fine Gaelers to whom O’Leary was speaking. These people seemed, on the evidence of the reaction described above, to have very little time for the teaching profession, as public sector workers with highly effective and organised unions. (Then again, a later line about accountants not having great personalities absolutely killed, so maybe it was just that they were an easy crowd. In fact, to give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt, perhaps O’Leary, whose first job was as an accountant at KPMG, was really doing a deceptively sophisticated self-referential riff, in which the failure to make even an entry-level joke about accountants not having great personalities was itself the joke.)
This year, according to an annual study by the green advocacy group Transport & Environment, the company over which O’Leary presides is Europe’s most polluting airline – for the third year running. The part of O’Leary’s speech that wasn’t about teachers, incidentally, was focused on the need to keep the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil Coalition in power, while removing the left-wing nuisance of the Green Party. The fact that O’Leary used a five-minute speech, supporting the election campaign of his local Fine Gael TD, to go after unionised public-sector employees and environmentalist politicians tells us nothing we don’t already know about O’Leary.
The fact that he did so at a Fine Gael campaign event, and to such gleeful response, is a useful reminder of where that party is coming from.
The last thing a party looking to get re-elected wants, in the run-up to polling day, is to be portrayed as contemptuous of an entire profession – especially one comprising more than 120,000 voters. Unsurprisingly, Fine Gael immediately sought to distance itself from O’Leary’s comments, with Simon Harris characterising them as “crass and ill-informed”. But he had little to say about the reaction to those comments from his own party faithful, presumably because Fine Gael can’t distance itself from itself.
If O’Leary wouldn’t, as he put it, necessarily employ a bunch of teachers to go out and get things done, I myself wouldn’t employ the chief executive of a budget airline to run a country – or, for that matter, to campaign for the re-election of a party that does. I have been a Ryanair passenger more often than I care to remember, and I can tell you that the primary school my children attend operates a great deal more efficiently. And it does so, unlike Ryanair, without pumping millions of tonnes of carbon annually into the air of a planet they will have no choice but to inherit.