LIKE Tony Blair, the Queen of Denmark and Jeb Bush before me, I recently booked flights with that cutest of cut-price airlines, Ryanair.

Tickets to Sardinia weren't going for nothing - not like the company's current offers to Szczecin and Friedrichshafen (after all, one knows roughly where Sardinia is) - but they were still dirt-cheap.

Yet the more I battled through the online booking, the more irritated I got. Not included in the price were airport taxes, a fee for each item of stowed baggage and even a fine for making the payment by the wildly unusual method of debit card.

I can now report that Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's chief executive, is the very personification of his company's booking process: cheeky, annoying but still, when all is said and done, good value.

To journalists, he talks in deliberately outrageous quotes that fly from his mouth faster than a Boeing out of Stansted (this is no jibe against Ryanair's punctuality, which, as he points out, is second to none).

The difficulty is to get him to speak with anything like reflection, a quality he clearly does not think plays in print or, perhaps, life. He believes that he has the measure of newspapers.

When it comes to press photos he always plays the eejit, gurning and pointing his model aeroplane suggestively, all in the cause of not boring the readers.

Fame

"Publicity mad" might be one diagnosis, though he says he has no interest in personal fame and turned down the BBC when it asked if he would like Alan Sugar's role in the television programme 'The Apprentice'.

Or it may just be hyper-activity. He scoops me up from the reception of his Dublin Airport HQ and, upstairs, we discuss how he can afford to sell tickets for nothing. The point is that he has fixed costs - planes, crews, landing rights - and it is better to make some money selling passengers insurance, car hire and soft drinks than to fly empty planes. Besides, next time the punters will probably think of Ryanair. Because, I say, everyone likes a bargain. "It's not so much they like a bargain. It's that they've been ripped off for the past 50 years because governments got together with the airlines after 1945. BA got the monopoly in the UK, Air France the monopoly in France and Lufthansa the monopoly in Germany. This is the only industry where the producers are allowed by the idiots in Brussels to get together once or twice a year to fix the fares and capacities and get anti-trust immunity to do it. It's a joke."

O'Leary took the controls at Ryanair in 1994 after being recruited from the world of finance by its founder, Tony Ryan, in 1988. He has taken it from the brink of bankruptcy to the brink of overtaking Lufthansa as the largest international scheduled carrier. "We're the big boys now," he boasts.

You'll never find a Ryanair steward pressing a complimentary glass of champagne in your hand, but many of the treats that the posher big boys offer you don't miss: reclining seats that recline into your face; foil-lipped quasi-meals; seat pockets containing the last passenger's wet wipes. True, there is no question of even a drinks voucher if your flight is delayed, but what do you expect for an average fare of ?42 (BA's fuel surcharge alone is ?50)?

Yet unlike those other pioneers of cheaper flying - Freddie Laker, Richard Branson and Stelios Haji-Ioannou - O'Leary is no one's national treasure. Why? "I'm probably just an obnoxious little bollocks. Who cares? The purpose is not to be loved. The purpose is to have the passengers on board. Being successful is about having the lowest costs; that means beating the crap out of suppliers, and most of our suppliers are government-owned airports or agencies, which means we fight constantly with governments and idiot Brussels bureaucrats who want to put up the cost of travel, or half-witted environmentalists who can't add two and two."

Guilty

Has he never thought that being pleasant might be a better approach? "I'm always actually very pleasant, but don't believe in trotting out all that PC claptrap just not to upset a couple of f***ing environmental lunatics. They are just loons."

But are they? With the planet going to hell, perhaps we should feel guilty about air travel. "Absolutely not. Keep flying. I smile at these environmental loons who drive their SUVs down to the supermarket on a Saturday morning. If you're concerned about the environment, stop driving. Aircraft account for 4pc of emissions in Europe, motor cars for 28pc."

There is no space to detail the individuals who have crossed O'Leary: Mary O'Rourke; the airline's millionth customer, who took him to court when told her lifetime free flights did not cover a bank holiday weekend; the cerebral-palsy sufferer who successfully sued after being charged for a wheelchair.

Even the British police have been added to the list, after a terrorism scare diverted a plane to Prestwick, in Scotland.

"Those police force were outstanding in their field," he says. Were they? "Yes, but all they did was stand in their field. They kept passengers on board while they played with a suspect package for two and three-quarter hours. Extraordinary." He says bookings jumped by a fifth after the Prestwick diversion. "It's because the papers are all over Sky News. As long as it's not safety-related, there's no such thing as bad publicity."

But safety was exactly the issue that in February Ryanair: Caught Napping, an edition of Channel 4's Dispatches, tried to raise. The secretly filmed documentary depicted dirty planes, invigilated by exhausted crew, being flown by pilots working right up to the legal limit for flying. "But the maximum number of hours is 900 a year, divided by 46 weeks: 18 hours a week," he protests. "People don't understand. There's a reason there's a legal maximum: you can't go over it. It's designed to ensure that they are rested. They're working 18 hours a week! How would you not be rested?"

What about the cabin crew, shown literally weeping with fatigue? "OK. We got the rosters for the two journalists who'd been working (undercover as crew) for the three months. One averaged 36 hours a week, one 28 hours. They filmed one in her flat late at night who, crying and whispering, claimed to have been at work since 4am and just got back at 8pm. Rubbish! We have maximum duty days of 14 hours. She never did it! What you're left with is two journalists, one of whom was working a four-day week and the other working a three-and-a-half-day week - which I accept for journalists is a very busy week."

And the sick that they covered up with perfume? "There's sick bags on board the aircraft and lots of cloths. If there's a very bad one, you call the cleaners at the airport. It's no big issue."

Even though they have only 25 minutes' turnaround on the ground? "How long does it take to clean up some sick?"

On the night of transmission O'Leary held a staff party and handed out "Oscars" - rather than P45s - to the employees who had told the greatest "porkies" on camera. Not only had C4 not landed the killer blow but, after transmission, bookings rose 15pc. Yet surely, I say, any other employer would want to learn from a programme that had spent five months secretly filming his business. Does he never make mistakes?

"I make the wrong decision on numerous different things. The most recent was when I launched an in-flight entertainment system about a year ago. It was going to be the future of aviation, everybody flying for free but buying movies onboard." What went wrong? "I was persuaded against my better judgment to put lottery scratch cards on board as well. I said, 'Forget it, they're for morons'. After about three months, nobody was playing the DVDs because everybody was scratching lottery cards. So we took the DVDs off and made more room for scratch cards. If that's what the publics wants . . . "

One annoying thing about populist multimillionaires such as O'Leary is that they make it seem as if their success is built on nothing loftier than common sense. There has to be more to it than that, if only an exceptional degree of motivation. O'Leary, however, will not permit me to probe very deeply into his.

Yes, he was the eldest of six children brought up in Co Westmeath and, yes, you had to be competitive just to get fed. Yes, too, his "mercurial" father was an entrepreneur (not a very successful one). It is also true that he was beaten with a leather strap by Jesuits at his boarding school but, he says, the pupils were "obnoxious, rude teenage boys" - how else could they be kept in order?

'Angsty'

"All this Freudian angsty crap of 'Where did it all start?' I didn't have a lot of money. I wanted to make money pretty quickly. I got lucky and made money. That was it. I do it now because I'm competitive. I want to stuff it to BA."

Because it's English? "We love tilting at the English, have done it for about 700 years, but we're only getting our own back. Remember they beat the crap out of us for the first 600."

Perhaps, I suggest, his pugnacious reputation prevented one of the richest men in Ireland from finding a wife until he was nearly 40? "Many would say yes. In fact, I generally get on very well with women, but I spent from 20 to 40 working like a black." He can't say that! "I can bloody say that. I used to work seven days a week and usually 14, 16-hour days. I had no time for girlfriends. I didn't have girlfriends for ten or 15 years."

So how did he meet Anita Farrell, a former banker? "At a wedding that I was brutally dragged to because it was one of the Ryans (his old boss's family). She was a bridesmaid and took pity on me." What's she like? "Great. End of conversation. She's not in the interview." And their infant son, Matt? What sort of father is he turning out to be to him? "I'm taking the Ryanair approach to it: subcontracting everything." Has he changed a nappy? "I changed the first nappy in the hospital and, called upon in emergency, I will do another. I'm not one of these people who will be there doing the full-time father lark."

Last year he said he would retire in 2008, but he is always promising to leave in two or three years' time. "I'll be gone in three, four, five years. Could be two. When we're the biggest airline in Europe it will be inappropriate to have somebody here shouting, swearing, abusing the competition. You need more professional management than me. And that time is coming." So a ghastly, twinkly Irishman might succeed him? "Much more likely a ghastly, emollient Englishman, probably with a knighthood: Sir Roger Mucknsmuck."

We clamber on to the roof for O'Leary to make faces for the photographer, who keeps saying: "Great, Michael, but could we try it with, er, a more normal expression."

Expressing himself normally, being an ordinary businessman, is exactly what scares him, of course. Afterwards he insists on driving us back to the airport and, catching a set of keys, loads us into what might originally have been a white van.

It's Michael O'Leary taking two more journalists for a ride, but only to the check-in gates - another cheap, cheerful, no-frills trip aboard Ryanair.

- Andrew Billen