Maybe the newly contrite Michael O’Leary will bring a swear jar to work in Ryanair’s head office. A fiver in the pot for every bad word uttered. Maybe he’ll rebrand the company as “the airline that likes to be nice” and spend the proceeds from the jar on free flights for passengers.
And maybe pigs will fly higher than his 737s.
There was the soberness of the convert about O’Leary in last weekend’s video that even the sunflowers in the background could not edify. He looked like the familiarly flippant Mick. The sleeves of his Ralph Lauren shirt were pushed up, the collar unbuttoned, but he was stumbling over words as if they were trying to choke him. He appeared to be reading from an autocue. Most sensationally, he was apologising.
Having adamantly refused to retract his comment that rival airlines were “high-fare rapists” and spurning the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s offer of education about the harm caused by trivialising language, here he was saying a “sincere and unreserved” sorry.
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Why did it take Michael O’Leary 10 days to cop on that his comments on rape were wrong?
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“In conversations with family and friends both inside and outside Ryanair over the last 10 days, I have come to realise, however, that the word that I used so carelessly has caused considerable upset and offence to a wide number of people, especially to victims and survivors,” he said in the video posted last Friday.
It was a spectacular climbdown by the enfant terrible of the executive suite. And it was thoroughly welcome, which is probably why there has been hardly a ripple about it since. After all, it’s not the sort of nit-picking conversation anyone who knows about the trauma of sexual violence wants to prolong. Chief among them are the 52 per cent of women and 28 per cent of men who are subjected to it in their lifetime, according to the Central Statistics Office, and who may have been thinking twice about flying with Ryanair again after the chief executive’s obnoxious remark. As Britain’s transport minister, Heidi Alexander, put it, rape survivors were unlikely to be “rushing to book tickets with him”.
In contrast to the original comment, made to media microphones at Ryanair’s annual general meeting, no journalists were present for the apology. Ergo, there was no chance to ask why it took him 10 days to cop on when, some say, he is so smart he should be running Ireland. Had he not heard the Taoiseach on the radio the previous Monday advising him to “stand back, reflect and listen to women on this issue”? Had those who changed his mind this time around failed in 2004 after he called the owners of Stansted Airport “a bunch of over-charging rapists”? Were Ryanair’s phones hopping with incensed customers?
I do not doubt O’Leary meant it when he eventually said sorry, but his PR department must have been gratified to see the apology being duly reported by Bloomberg and Tripadvisor. Gratifying too for Ryanair’s shareholders, including O’Leary, who gets a 10 million shares option potentially worth €150 million with his new remuneration package – if the company’s profits top €4 billion.
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For further education, he should read Nikita Hand’s memoir, Not the Perfect Victim, about how she insisted on getting justice after Conor McGregor raped her. The book’s prologue is a harrowing account of the first day she saw the fighter in the Four Courts after the violent attack. “I cannot do this,” she cried, and bolted, racing towards the stairs, collapsing halfway up, crawling on all fours to the top step, stumbling into the public toilets, falling upon the sink, hyperventilating, retching. “Breathe,” said Cliona Woods from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, holding her, soothing her. Half an hour later, Nikita was in the courtroom for the start of the case that McGregor dragged all the way to the Court of Appeal, and then attempted a Supreme Court appeal, in a vain effort to overturn the civil jury’s verdict that he raped her.
Women have been compelled time and again to sacrifice their privacy to explain to others more fortunate than them the physical, psychological and emotional suffering caused by rape. And, still, the ambiguity and careless talk persist. O’Leary is, by no means, the worst culprit. Compared to the “lighten up” brigade, he is well down the food chain that keeps nibbling away at women’s entitlement to be safe. The A-to-Z from the joker in the pub who’s only having a laugh to NBC’s Jimmy Fallon feting McGregor on his Tonight show in June without any mention of the civil jury’s verdict that he raped a woman.
“When I say I could murder a pint, am I trivialising murder?” argued one social media genius in defence of O’Leary.
Rape is the extreme expression of society’s sexist culture. It’s the scum that rises to the top of the cauldron from a swill of loose language, laddish jokes and collaboration by some women. Sadly, the Benny Hill era of busty starlets and models draped over car bonnets is not the past. It’s the here and now only strutting a girl-power tag. Spice Girls feminism was a marketer’s insult to women office workers confronted with topless page three girls in tabloids strewn around the desks. Now some US actress is advertising some product in the nude, and we are supposed to find it funny.
The disconnect in society’s mind between the objectification of women and gender violence was graphically exposed by a commentarial backlash in the summer when the Government announced a public awareness campaign about toxic masculinity. Ineffective and a waste of public money, went the dominant argument. And Jesus wept.
The mistake O’Leary made was ignoring the professional expertise of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre when it explained that his word choice trivialised rape – and he presumed to know better. He has not publicly apologised to the centre, which Nikita Hand says was “my lifeline”. Stacks of academic research demonstrate the link between the manosphere’s gospel and violence against women. Oberstown Children Detention Centre reported in July that toxic masculinity was “an emerging trend” among its inmates.
Society cannot have enough education about the sexism stew endangering women. Roll on those Government ads about toxic masculinity – and let’s have some about toxic femininity too, because those who know about sexual violence are sick and sore from waiting for society to cop on.
