{"id":275305,"date":"2026-02-01T12:01:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T12:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/275305\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T12:01:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T12:01:07","slug":"michael-oleary-offers-hope-of-eventual-return-to-ukraine-but-only-on-ryanairs-terms-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/275305\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael O\u2019Leary offers hope of eventual return to Ukraine but only on Ryanair\u2019s terms \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryanair<\/a> chief executive Michael O\u2019Leary<\/a> may have won unlikely allies during his recent run-in with Elon Musk<\/a> but on the company\u2019s latest earnings call with analysts, he returned to the persona most know: provocative, unsparing and mercilessly focused on cost and operational control.<\/p>\n

The airline reported strong results \u2013 no surprise there, given shares have soared almost 50 per cent over the last year \u2013 but it was O\u2019Leary\u2019s commentary on Ukraine, airport operations, and commercial opportunities that drew the sharpest attention.<\/p>\n

On Ukraine, O\u2019Leary emphasised Ryanair\u2019s unique flexibility. Whilst he doesn\u2019t foresee peace any time soon (\u201cI don\u2019t see any pressure on Putin to do a deal\u201d), he noted that Ryanair is ready to respond quickly.<\/p>\n

The airline says it can redeploy flights within four weeks to cities such as Kyiv or Lviv, and has proposed reopening 30-40 routes from across Europe.<\/p>\n

Lest attending analysts were thinking that O\u2019Leary had softened to become a benevolent chief executive, he swiftly disabused them of any such notion. <\/p>\n

Speaking of Ukraine\u2019s airports, he dismissed their performance over the past four years as \u201cuseless\u201d, \u201csitting on their arses doing nothing for the last four years\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ryanair could deliver fares of \u20ac19.99 or \u20ac24.99 for five million seats, he said, but only on its terms. \u201cListen, lads, forget full published charges. Those days are over. If you want this rapid growth and rapid reconstruction, we want big discounts off those bullshit published charges.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps Wizz Air might agree to pay published charges, said O\u2019Leary, but that\u2019s \u201cwhy they can\u2019t make any money\u201d.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Leary might be disappointed that his provocative comments largely passed under the media radar. That wasn\u2019t the case when he took on Musk, a spat that O\u2019Leary said had generated 1,500 news articles across 59 different countries, \u201cmany of whom had never heard of Ryanair before, but certainly have now\u201d.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Leary\u2019s bluntness may have gone largely unnoticed this time, but in the Ryanair playbook, every provocation is a press release waiting to happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryanair chief executive Michael O\u2019Leary may have won unlikely allies during his recent run-in with Elon Musk but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,605,61,60,1899,9688],"class_list":["post-275305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-elon-musk","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-ryanair","tag-ukraine-crisis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}