THE flight is scheduled to take off at 7.40am. So at 7.15am, there is still time to grab a coffee. But then again, perhaps there isn't.

"Will passenger Quinlan please make his way immediately to Gate 11 where Ryanair flight 7052 to Porto is ready to depart. Passenger Quinlan, please move your arse!"

The voice over the PA system was unmistakably that of Michael O'Leary. As always, he is in a hurry, and nobody, least of all a reporter from the Sunday Independent, is going to slow him down.

Last Thursday morning, the Ryanair chief killed a number of birds with one stone when he took off from Dublin Airport for the opening of the airline's 33rd European base at Francisco Sa Carneiro in Portugal.

Stopping on the tarmac there for less than an hour, O'Leary posed for pictures with Portugal's Prime Minister Jose Socrates, announced the creation of 1,500 jobs, conducted individual interviews with nine Portuguese reporters and waved a European flag from the cockpit window of his airline's Boeing 737 while calling loudly for a Yes vote on Lisbon.

The Irish journalists accompanying O'Leary on his Iberian jaunt barely had time to get sunburned before being frogmarched back up the steps for a series of one-to-one interviews on the flight back to Dublin.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent over what must have been one of the only free lunches in the history of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary sets out his views on a range of issues, from Lisbon to Aer Lingus to Nama, the Government's so-called 'bad bank' solution to the property loan woes of Ireland's banking sector.

So what's the real reason for Ryanair's Lisbon campaign then?

On this, Michael O'Leary is clear.

"The only thing keeping Ireland afloat at the moment is our membership of the EU and the ECB who are going to fund Nama. We are losing foreign investment. We are going to have to stay at the heart of Europe if we want to have a decent economy and jobs, and prop up our bankrupt country. By being in Europe, we're less dependent on the political incompetence, not so much in the present government, but in the one led by Bertie Ahern in the last 10 years, the one that pissed away all the money buying off the public sector unions," he says.

So nothing to do with currying favour with the EU, which so far has opposed Ryanair's efforts to take over Aer Lingus on competition grounds, then?

"Ultimately, we will be allowed to buy Aer Lingus. In another 18 months and with more redundancies, they'll have burned their way through the last of the cash they have and will need to be rescued. They don't have any vision for the future. We do. We can turn it around. Sit at the sidelines now and watch Aer Lingus go bankrupt like all these other companies that are either destroyed by government ownership, or by headbanger trade unionists," O'Leary responds.

A bankrupt country and a bankrupt airline. Scary stuff, but what to do about it all?

Perhaps Michael might take the time to go to the Government's upcoming Global Irish Economic Forum to pitch his ideas to save the country?

"No. I told them I wouldn't show up to it. We got this invitation back in February for a three-day shindig of the great and the good who have nothing to contribute. I mean, Bob Geldof never created a bloody job in Ireland in his life. I'm not just singling him out, but you'll have all the usual 'come all ye's' and the social bloody partners and all it is, is a jolly. They're even going to the All-Ireland final on the Sunday! I wrote back to Cowen and said this is all being hosted by Micheal Martin, and he's a waste of space."

So what would Michael O'Leary do to make things better?

"What you want to have is a group of business people with concrete ideas to take one day in the middle of November. Don't make it a big media event where we listen to speeches from Bob 'bloody' Geldof and gobshites from Cori. They're not the ones who deliver jobs. Take 20 or 30 sensible business people and we'll give you the solutions. I'm not going to waste three days of my life farting around in Farmleigh, listening to all those bunnies waffling on in cliches before going to the All-Ireland bloody final! It's a photoshoot for a Government that wants to look like it's doing something. Frankly I have better things to do with my time, like growing Ryanair."

So what does he make of the Government's work rate to date? We have, after all, had the publication of the McCarthy Report, draft legislation on Nama and the pending report of the Commission on Taxation.

The Ryanair chief isn't impressed.

"Colm McCarthy produced a report in July. What have the Government done? Nothing. Instead of delaying its publication until they had all gone off on holidays, they should have published it two weeks before the end of the Dail term, voted it in and then gone on holidays. They're the only group I've ever known whose response to a crisis is to go on holidays."

When it comes to Nama, O'Leary doesn't have a difficulty with the concept of the so-called 'bad bank'. But he does have serious reservations on the price the taxpayer will have to pay for the banks' property loans.

O'Leary explains: "My thoughts on Nama are simple. The real issue is the discount Nama is going to buy the loans at. We should only buy the banks' debt on whatever the current value of those properties are; otherwise you are giving the banks or the property developers a subsidy they don't deserve. That means the banks are going to take much bigger losses. It also means the Government is going to have put more money into the banks, but we should. We should invest more money in the banks and if it means the Government and the people are going to own 90 per cent of Bank of Ireland and AIB, so be it. But we shouldn't nationalise them."

So where to then for the Irish taxpayers and for the banks whose share registers they will come to dominate?

O'Leary says: "Take up 80 or 90 per cent of the shares, force the banks to work out the bad debt provisions and give them the incentive to get the taxpayer off their share registers. Bankrupt the property developers if they deserve to be bankrupted and put the properties on the open market. You see people selling private homes at a 50 per cent discount. We should do the same with the commercial offices and all the rest of it, and they will sell. For every Sean Dunne out there, there's a Gallagher family who still have the cash from Sean Dunne."

And should we refuse to take the hit upfront on the banks' property loans, could we be facing a 'lost decade' similar to that experienced by Japan in the Nineties?

"Yes, we will. Do what they do in the United States. Take the pain. Bankrupt the property developers and let the banks take the bad debts. The key issue is not Nama or nationalisation. Don't, for Christ's sake, buy the bank debt at some kind of inflated price. Make them take the hit," O'Leary says.

Somewhat controversially, the Ryanair chief believes the bankers themselves should be allowed to work out the problems of their property loan books rather than officials from Nama.

"The only people who can sort out the bad debts are the banks. You have to incentivise the banks to go and bankrupt the bankrupt property developers and go and work with the successful ones. The only way you can make that happen is make it in the bankers' interests to get that done. By all means do Nama, but you must make the bankers work out the loan books. The banks know where the bodies are buried, which developers are bankrupt and which aren't."

O'Leary adds that: "The bankers who mismanaged the banks in recent years were ably assisted by the incompetent regulators and the incompetent civil servants at the Department of Finance, and they have, largely speaking, been removed. There is a new generation of middle management in the banks who, if you give them a chance and incentivise them to clean up the loan books and take the tough decisions, can do it.

"Liam Carroll owns lots of properties that are being let to Government institutions. These are performing assets. They can be sold tomorrow to international investors at face value. We need to sort this out. There are lots of worthwhile properties there that are saleable, but the only ones who can work that out are the bankers. A civil servant isn't qualified to do that. What is he going to do? He'll go out and hire a bloody estate agent, the same people who made a bollocks of the property market for the last number of years. Leave the problem with the banks and let the taxpayer share in the upside because we'll ultimately be able to sell our share in the banks on the open market."

So, coming back to the issue of Lisbon II, would Michael O'Leary be fearful that the public will vote No again given their growing distrust of the Government on just about everything?

"I think there's a danger the people might vote against Europe because it's an opportunity to give the Government a kick. What's different about the Ryanair campaign is we're going to be critical of the Government. We think this Government is useless. We think this Government should be voted out. But we still think you should vote Yes for Europe simply for the reason that Europe delivers jobs and Europe is what is saving our economy, and Europe is what ultimately will save us from the political incompetence of our politicians at home," O'Leary says.