If in doubt, apply the O'Leary test
Evidence of bullshit in a country facing ruination brings out the Michael in all of us, writes Declan Lynch
A large warning sign was recently erected at an unmanned level crossing down the road from me. It advises the citizen to keep an eye out for any trains that might be coming.
And while I am not aware of any accident ever taking place at that particular level crossing, I accept that there is a major public interest in making absolutely sure that it stays that way.
Admittedly, this may seem like a strange time to be spending a considerable sum of money in such an apparently low-risk location, but again I accept there may have been a few near misses over the past 70 years of which I am unaware.
What I don't accept is that another large warning sign was erected at this level crossing, which says exactly what the first sign says, in Irish. Though I know a bit of Irish from way back, it took me about a minute to figure out what this other sign was saying, a minute during which my chances of getting run over by a train had increased enormously.
But the problem with this sign in Irish is not just that it constitutes a threat to human life in a country where a sign in, say, Polish, would have genuine merit. It is also the fact that it brings out the Michael O'Leary in all of us.
We ask ourselves if Ryanair has ever used any of its precious resources unnecessarily translating things into Irish, and we quickly conclude that it has not. Indeed, we can easily imagine Michael O'Leary loudly denouncing such extravagance in a country that is facing ruination, but where they can still somehow find large amounts of money for this bilingual bullshit.
Not that O'Leary himself is entirely blameless in the bullshit game. As a rule, if he ever gives the slightest hint that he is acting in the public interest, rather than in the interest of Michael O'Leary, then he too is bullshitting. And his regular-guy act has always had a certain waft of bullshit -- indeed, the British would probably be amazed to learn that this cavorting Paddy is the Irish equivalent of an Old Etonian.
And yet in so many other areas he has made such a sterling contribution to the war on bullshit, he has carved out this place in the national consciousness -- if we are ever in any doubt that we are in the presence of bullshit, we merely have to apply the O'Leary test.
Warning signs in Irish, for example, would get an instant No Grade. And O'Leary's rigour was emphasised last week by his declaration that the idea of a co-pilot being needed to fly a plane was, well . . . bullshit.
I suppose it was always going to come to this.
Right from the start it was O'Leary's enormous good fortune to find himself in an industry so fantastically rich in bullshit, a man could spend every day of the rest of his life sweeping it away, and still leave much undone.
So in his unceasing efforts to take the romance out of aviation, it was inevitable that the role of the pilot would come under O'Leary's forbidding gaze.
How it must gall him to see these guys dressed up in their fancy uniforms, pretending that it takes two of them to fly the plane when, in fact, the planes are so easy to fly these days, you could probably take the most junior baggage-handler and turn him into a fully-functioning airline pilot after about 20 minutes of basic instruction.
O'Leary claims that the second pilot could be replaced by stewardesses trained to land the plane in an emergency -- and does any of us honestly doubt that he is right ?
After all, he was right when he figured that an airline didn't actually need to be paying some PR company a few million every year when the airline's chief executive, if he is worth a damn, can draw up this year's advertising campaign on the back of an envelope (on the front of which he can draw up next year's campaign).
And in his attack on pilots, he is in illustrious company. Jerry Seinfeld has a riff about the self-importance of pilots, the way they give us a running commentary on their work -- "we're taxi-ing on the runway" and so forth. Seinfeld sees himself knocking on the door of the cockpit to reciprocate: "I'm just opening my peanuts . . ."
And there was another line of O'Leary's last week which had shades of Oscar Wilde -- "the customer is usually wrong", O'Leary said.
Wilde was a great man for taking a universally accepted cliche and turning it upside down, not just for humourous effect, as is commonly thought, but because the opposite is actually true.
In claiming that the customer is usually wrong, O'Leary has identified a universal malaise. After all, if the customer is usually right, the world would not be full of bad books and bad music and bad stuff of every description.
But they peddle that old line anyway, rounding us up into focus groups to quiz us about things we already know, justifying it with this bullshit that the customer is always right, that they are giving the people what they want.
Our civilisation is dying because we, the customers, are getting only what we want, not what we need. And then there's Ryanair, which apparently we need, but we don't want.
The customer never really wants to fly Ryanair, and yet somehow he ends up doing it, again and again. In fact, it could be said that the entire Ryanair empire is built on the premise that the customer is always wrong.
And on the war against bullshit, for which Michael O'Leary should be presented with the Purple Heart.
Originally published in
