Conor McCarthy pauses, sits back in his chair and folds his arms. We have entered the fourth hour of our interview, and this is the first time that the head of Dublin Aerospace has drawn breath or even paused.

For the previous three hours, McCarthy has candidly and colourfully woven together the strands of his career in aviation, and his journey as a person. He has spoken about wealth, tax and family, and helpfully littered the conversation with juicy anecdotes about the characters – from Michael O’Leary to Alan Joyce to Tony Fernandes – he has met along the way.  

He has meditated about Brexit, Covid-19 and the future of aviation, and spoken frankly about why, despite spending so much time out of the country, he ideologically objected to joining the list of monied tax exiles. He has provided a socially distant tour of his cavernous Hangar 5 facility on the campus of Dublin Airport, happily posed for photographs, and even made the coffee. Now, though, as he sits in his run-down office overlooking the factory floor, McCarthy is momentarily silent.

The topic has turned to management. Specifically, his own management style. It is a standard question and one that most entrepreneurs or executives usually dispatch with a standard response. Some delve into the business-school playbook and say they are against hierarchical structures, while others talk about leading through culture.

McCarthy, however, is not one for standard responses. After all, this is a man who bet most of his hard-earned net worth buying a perennial loss-making aircraft maintenance company in the depth of the last recession, and who has been expanding his interests on a monthly basis during this latest crisis.

So instead of rolling out a stock answer, McCarthy considers his response, before leaning in and smiling. “I’d say I am a pain in the arse, frankly, to work for – that is my honest opinion,” he says.

“I break people’s balls without meaning to do it. I am just naturally impatient. When I see where I want to be, I’m kind of whooshing everyone forward. Come on. Come on. Move. Move. Forward. Forward.

“Having said that, I love people. I really do. I love people. I talk too much. I’m a pain in the arse because I say the same thing twice for fear that someone did not get it the first time. I am passionate and I think the passion comes over when I am working with a team. People who are equally passionate will cling on and we will work together.”

PlaneConsult, his aviation consultancy, has remained busy advising airlines through the crisis. Oh. And he launched a new airline.

As he finishes his sentence, a huge, deafening noise begins to erupt from the hangar. It is, McCarthy tells me, a Ram Air Turbine, used in Airbus planes when it loses all other electrical power. When the noise subsides, I ask if his management style has changed over the year, or whether he has always been a pain in the arse.

“It has refined, yeah. One of the reasons I took the decision to leave Ryanair was I was working so closely with Michael and within that culture, my own management style was changing in a way that I wouldn’t think was ideal. In other words, I was becoming a lot more clipped, I was becoming a lot more digital and directional but I didn’t really want to hear someone else’s input because I’d just got directions and I needed to get something done and I didn’t have all day. I had to start now. And someone wanted me to fill in the gaps. That’s not my style, it just isn’t,” he says.

“I’m 43 years in the business and sometimes I hold up a mirror and I think, fuck’s sake, have I learned anything. I mean I’m still impatient. But having said that I care a lot about people and I care that they feel they make a difference. And of course, it doesn’t always work, sometimes you’ve to part company and that’s difficult. I find that very difficult where you come to those crossroads.

“I really love to see people develop and I love to see people come on as professionals or as managers and so yeah, for me it’s not about the fact that we might have €10 million on our balance sheet or that we’re profitable. It’s crucial to be profitable because without profit you don’t get job security; you don’t get business growth. And if you can’t grow your business you become less relevant each year and your competitor becomes more relevant.”

Most interviews last less than an hour. However, Conor McCarthy, who holds a degree from Trinity without ever completing the Leaving Certificate, is not your average interviewee.

Launching a new airline, buying out Airbus

It is not easy keeping up with Conor McCarthy. But it sure is fun trying. Take his activities over the last six months. He was an active member of the state’s Aviation Recovery Taskforce, which did something almost unparalleled in the world of Irish policy – it published a report ahead of schedule.

He also finalised a shareholder restructure at Dublin Aerospace, buying out stakes held by Airbus, Enterprise Ireland and equity held by three former executives. The share recalibration leaves McCarthy with 75 per cent of the business, which made a €5.2 million profit last year on revenues of €50 million.

McCarthy also revealed that Dublin Aerospace was opening its first British base after taking over grounded airline Flybe’s servicing operations at Exeter Airport. It also bought the tools and equipment used to service craft at the facility.

The new facility will focus on turbo-props made by European player ATR, along with regional jets manufactured by Bombardier and Embraer. The move, McCarthy says, is a reaction to Brexit and comes as the company advances a €15m investment in a new operation at Ashbourne in Co Meath, which will ultimately employ 100 people.

PlaneConsult, his aviation consultancy, has remained busy advising airlines through the crisis. Oh. And he launched a new airline.

Emerald Airlines was established in May and has already secured preferred bidder status to operate the Aer Lingus Regional service when Stobart Air’s franchise agreement expires at the end of 2022.

And he has done all of this during the worst crisis ever to hit the global aviation industry. Covid-19 has reduced the company’s growth projections – revenues for this year will be €40 million and not the €60 million forecast – while the company has furloughed 100 of its 450-strong workforce. Profits will fall to half last year’s number, but the company’s balance sheet remains robust, McCarthy says, while the pipeline of business remains strong. 

“Will this year be as good as last year? No way,” he says. “But will we go out of business? No way.”

Rising through the ranks at Aer Lingus, battling Ryanair

Conor McCarthy’s office is grim. It is small, sparse and could easily pass for the side office at a backstreet garage. There is no art or furnishings. His Entrepreneur of the Year award, which he won in 2011 after buying SR Technics and transforming it into Dublin Aerospace, is the only real sign of corporate success.

But this is exactly the way McCarthy wants it. “We have a nice suite up there,” he says, pointing to the other side of the hangar. “That is where our finance and HR team are. But for me, I want to be where the action is. And where the action is is where most of our employees are. So, I want to be near the people who are doing the work.

“It’s a very personal business. You rely on every individual to do their thing. It has actually come full circle – 43 years ago, September 18, 1978, I started as an apprentice in Aer Lingus and this was the hangar we were brought to first.”

*****

McCarthy grew up in north Dublin, and the airport loomed large over the area. It was, he says, the place to work. It was the late seventies, and the economic outlook was poor. Most people in his area left school before completing the Leaving Cert at the time, while few went to college.

In fifth year, he dispatched letters to the ESB, CIÉ and Aer Lingus looking for an apprenticeship. In his first week of sixth year, following some interviews and assessments, he got offered an apprenticeship with Aer Lingus.

“This is better than college,” he told his parents. While doing the apprenticeship, he studied at night, getting a professional qualification from the City and Guilds Electrical Engineering Technicians. This allowed him entry into Bolton Street, where he got a first-class degree in production engineering and manufacturing engineering.

“We moved house about eight years ago and I took out my scroll when we were moving and discovered I had a second scroll behind it in maths. I didn’t realise I had a degree in maths all these years,” he smiles.

Like most engineers at the time, he was quickly promoted into a non-engineering role. Garrett Fitzgerald had left his Aer Lingus position to concentrate full time on politics, and McCarthy was drafted in to replace him as superintendent of route planning with Aer Lingus.

As Ryanair was getting serious, Aer Lingus was in serious trouble.

“Then I moved into marketing where I was responsible for market information, market research and competitor analysis. And around that time, we had a couple of competitors. The nemesis of airlines at that time in Ireland and the UK was an airline called Dan-Air because Dan-Air were a real upstart from Gatwick and you know, they were charging really cheap fares of like £100 only to travel to London. The prevailing wisdom was unless you paid £250, which was about four weeks or five weeks salary, you couldn’t be making any money, it was below-cost selling,” McCarthy says.

“And Ryanair started then in the late ’80s with their aircraft out of Waterford and then they quickly moved out of Dublin. They started flying to Gatwick and then they moved to Luton and then they started moving into these Rombach Jets. And suddenly Ryanair were teetering, absolutely losing their shirt. In 1992, they hit that point where Aer Rianta locked their aircraft because they had so much in unpaid bills. And they refused to supply them with catering because they hadn’t paid the caterer for any of it.

“And this unknown accountant in there was the controller who kind of managed the cashflow for Tony Ryan, a young fella from KPMG called Michael O’Leary. He came up with the idea that they would stop any catering and he faxed all the travel agents to tell them that he was taking £10 off the fares, they weren’t going to give them any food.

“If they wanted to buy a drink they could and he said we’re giving you £10, your customer has £10 off and they can spend that on a nice meal when they’re in Birmingham or Glasgow. And overnight their load factors jumped by about 15 points.

“So, in a short space of time, Michael became the CEO. He started running the business like a business. He focussed on cost, focussed on jets. Got rid of all their old ATR turboprops and just focussed on a single aircraft type and in the mid-’90’s then he started to lease 737s – old 737s – and fit them out with the maximum number of seats, single class, no frills. And absolutely, we took a pasting.”

As Ryanair was getting serious, Aer Lingus was in serious trouble. The Cahill Plan, named after the company’s chief executive Bernie Cahill, was devised as a result of the airline’s near-collapse in the early 1990s. The government made concessions on the Shannon stopover to help the airline, also.

To help the restructure, McCarthy was summoned from his role as chief executive of Aer Lingus Commuter to take charge of group strategy and special projects.

“They asked me to take on Aer Lingus Express. That was supposed to be our low-cost alternative to Ryanair. So, we started to work on that. We started to work with the unions in Aer Lingus about what we needed to do from a work practices point of view and a product point of view then with our market research and customers,” McCarthy recalls.

“And we had a fair handle on what was required but what was really required was a complete change of mindset, primarily in management ranks. Secondly, then, in the experienced staff ranks. Because you had to turn your back on a lot of stuff that Aer Lingus was known for in order to compete with Ryanair. When we did our research that the majority of 20 something-year-olds in Ireland at that time were taking their very first flight on, not Aer Lingus, but Ryanair.”

How big a threat was Ryanair at the time? “I was ringing alarm bells all around head office saying, guys, we’ve got about ten years. If we can’t turn this around, we’re toast. Because Ryanair was just capturing all the price-sensitive market. They had hit an absolute perfect vein which started with South West where people just want a safe, clean, reliable flight at the lowest price when you’re talking about a flight of one or two hours. They’re not interested in trying to finish food in 30 minutes so that the cabin crew can clean it up after them. They’re not interested in all the frills. There are certain things they will pay for, or some will pay for, but you know, that product, to set yourself up for that product, set yourself up with a high-cost base. And it took a long time for the legacy airlines to discover this and they have discovered it and they are really taking it to another level.

“But you will be amazed when you look around the world how many airlines are clinging on for dear life to the old legacy model. And it’s been proven to be unprofitable and inefficient. It’s unreal.”

And then, in 1995, McCarthy got a call from the unknown accountant working miracles at Ryanair. Michael O’Leary wanted to buy him lunch.

Working with O’Leary, floating Ryanair

Ian Kehoe (IK): Had you much interaction with Michael O’Leary before he called?

Conor McCarthy (CMcC): No. He was nowhere to be seen. No one even knew what this guy looked like. We just knew there was a guy in Ryanair who was after shaking the tree so hard that all the old soft fruit has fallen off it and he was really working that model. And they were growing alarmingly quickly.

IK: So, he was not the ubiquitous character we see today?

CMcC: Not at all. It was almost the antithesis of it. He was the most media-shy person you’d have ever met. He’s a year older than me. So, I was 28 in commuter and then I left commuter when I was about 30. So, I was about 34 in 1996 when he called me. He’s a year older than me, so he was 35. And I didn’t even know what he looked like. So, we met in a hotel over on the Southside and we had a very interesting dinner where we were jousting about brand versus price, value proposition versus cheap fares, profitability and so on. Because we were modelling what we thought was Ryanair’s profitability and he was saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding’. He said, ‘I’m embarrassed how much money we’re making; I’m hiding the money in maintenance reserves, anywhere I can. If the word gets out how much money we’re making on these old machines’, he said, ‘I’ll be toast’.

IK: It must have been appealing to go work in that environment, to go and work in a completely different culture?

CMcC: So, we had a dinner, had a chat. He made me an offer and we had a second dinner and deal done. So, that was October ’96, and I joined Ryanair as Director of Group Operations which is like a chief operating officer-type of role. And what a rollercoaster. They had about ten aircraft then. They had just taken delivery of the 11th.

My first lunch was with Tim Jeans, the commercial director, a great guy. It was the October bank holiday weekend he told me that he had sold 10 per cent more than his budgeted passenger numbers and spent only half of my marketing budget. So, here’s the commercial director who was saying great, I’m keeping my powder dry, I’m not going to spend all that money and yet I’ve got my revenue in the bag for the month. You never heard people talk like that in Aer Lingus and it was just hard-edge business. Ryanair were in business to make money out of flying passengers. In Aer Lingus we were saying that we would make money on long-haul but we don’t make money on short-haul. But the short-haul feeds the long-haul so we’re willing to take that loss.

IK: So you were essentially justifying making losses on short hauls, whereas Ryanair was actually making money on short hauls.

CMcC: Yeah, we’re willing to take a loss on those routes so that we can feed these profitable long-haul routes. I worked at the time in Aer Lingus with Alan Joyce who’s now group chief executive of Qantas. We were in the same planning unit. And in fact, Alan left Aer Lingus a month after I left it and I almost got him into Ryanair only O’Leary wouldn’t give him the extra two grand a year that it would have taken to snag him.

IK: Two grand?

CMcC: Yeah. I think Michael was paying his second line managers at the time, let’s say, thirty grand. Alan said he’d move but he wasn’t going to take a hit, he’d move for 32. And Michael said no, I’m not going to destroy the fabric of the salary structure. So, Alan liked him and would have liked to work with him but he said well I’m not moving for that. Then nearly two months later Alan moved to Australia and joined Ansett first and then rose through the ranks. So, it’s an interesting little world we’re living in.

IK: How do Joyce and O’Leary compare?

CMcC:  O’Leary is short on analysis, quick on decisiveness. Alan is a fantastic analyst. He’s got one of the best brains I’ve ever met and he thinks about stuff, he reads a lot, he’s incisive. But with Michael, he just wants to know is he pointing his gun east or west? Don’t give him a precise degree, he just wants to know is it east or west and then he’ll figure it out.

IK: How long did you spent at Ryanair?

CMcC: Just about five years. I left at the end of 2000. I think we floated the company in ’97 and my share options matured three years later. In about 2000 and so, in June 2000 I said I wanted to go and I agreed with Michael I’d stay until the end of the year and set up my own business, PlaneConsult then.

So, I kind of figured I’d 18 years under my belt in Aer Lingus where I’d spent a lot of time in different areas learning the trade. As I said, Michael as I are around the same age. He was an amazing CEO. Hard to work with, right, because he’s always right even though he may not have been always right. Often wrong, never in doubt. And so, you didn’t have long discussions about stuff.

If you had a pitch, if your pitch didn’t work it didn’t work, end of story, and he was the judge and jury. That can be difficult to learn and I was still probably a little immature. I thought there was still room for argument and I’d argue a lot. But he was strategically probably the strongest CEO I’ve ever worked with and I’ve worked with a lot of smart guys over the years. But strategically he knows where he’s going, not just now but in six months’ time and six months after that. So, he’s got a great direction and a great compass and he’s ruled out a lot of bullshit stuff beforehand.

He’s probably a fantastic chess player. He probably doesn’t play chess but if he did, I’d say he would be.

IK: And then you went off to PlaneConsult.

CMcC: I’d five years of low-cost carrier which was a fantastic experience because I knew how to make money with short-haul aircraft. And yet, I’d 18 years of deep experience at nuts and bolts level of an airline and operationally and safety and all that other stuff that’s absolutely crucial to just getting in there.

So, I didn’t really want to work for anyone else and I didn’t want to pursue a different career. I’d a young family, we had our fourth child at that stage, so we’d four kids all under the age of seven when I left. And yet, leaving Ryanair I knew, I’d worked for Aer Lingus so I couldn’t go back there really, having worked for Ryanair. I didn’t want to emigrate. We are home birds and we liked where we were, I didn’t want to disturb that too much and I’d become relatively wealthy through the shares in Ryanair and through being paid very well.

So, I didn’t have to go and find a job immediately but of course, I was only young and I wanted to build on this. So, I decided PlaneConsult was the way to go and I would advise airlines. So, I remember before I left Ryanair, I took a week off and went down to Chile where one of the ex-Aer Lingus guys worked. He worked for Lan Chile and he’d asked me to come down and advise them on what was happening there and I said, ‘Yeah, okay’. And it wasn’t a paid trip, they were going to take me down. I was staying with him, he was a good friend and I said, ‘Lovely, let’s do that’. And it was a way of me figuring out if I can add value to a legacy airline looking at it. So, I spent four days in Santiago looking and meeting all the people in different operational and commercial areas in the airline. And on day five then I presented to the CEO, one of the Enrique brothers, and presented to Luis and he saw the different areas I looked at. Where I saw the change management programme, where I saw them being able to take aircraft utilisation up by 20 per cent.

IK: So it is essentially a consultancy for the aviation.

CMcC: Yeah, that sort of thing. I remember one of my kids at the time, it was after PlaneConsult got going and he was asked what does your parent do and he says, he fixes airlines. I never thought of it that way before but I guess that was what I started out trying to do. And there was plenty of broken airlines out there and there are even more of them now, it’s just a matter of how much work do you want to do.

How a meeting in London led to AirAsia

In January 2001, Conor McCarthy got a phone call from a friend who worked in aviation leasing telling him that there was a guy in Malaysia who had made millions in the music industry who wanted to set up an airline. “Oh Jesus, another one,” McCarthy responded.

At his friend’s requests, he agreed to meet Tony Fernandes at the Hertz car rental desk in Stanstead Airport to offer some advice and run the rule over his plan.  He had no idea what Fernandes looked like, but was expecting a suave Antonio Banderas character with rock-star appeal. “The next thing I know there was a squat little fella of Indian extraction standing next to me. That is how I met Tony and we hit it off straight away,” McCarthy says.

Even now, almost twenty years later, McCarthy can still recall how the conversation went.

McCarthy: Forget it. It won’t work.

Fernandes: Why won’t it? I’ll fly people up here really cheap to London to either Luton or Stanstead and I’ll do a deal with Stelios or I’ll do a deal with O’Leary to pass on passengers to them and I’ll do the same in Malaysia.

McCarthy: No, it won’t work

Fernandes: What do you mean?

McCarthy: Michael fills his planes anyway without doing anything complicated and he hates complexity. In fact, complexity is the enemy of being a low-cost airline. If you don’t learn that today you’ll never make a success of low-cost airlines’.

Fernandes: What would you do?

McCarthy: How many people live in Malaysia?’

Fernandes: 25 million.

McCarthy: And it’s a big place on the peninsula and it’s got a big island called Borneo?’

Fernandes: Yeah.

McCarthy: Perfect and it’s only got one airline?.

Fernandes: Well there’s another airline there but they’re bust, they’ve only got two aircrafts, they were called AirAsia.

McCarthy: Okay. Well there you go.

Fernandes: What do you mean?’.

McCarthy: Set up a domestic airline, single class, single aircraft type, fill it, stack it high, sell it cheap and sell it through the internet directly to the consumer. You’ll never look back.

Fernandes: Really?

McCarthy: Yea.

They chatted over the proposal for the next two hours. McCarthy had met a string of would-be airline entrepreneurs since his departure from Ryanair. Most of them melted back into the shadows, so McCarthy did not expect anything to come from the Fernandes meeting.  

Two weeks later, however, a business plan arrived in his office by courier. It was an exact replica of the model they had discussed at the Hertz stand. McCarthy was in, and AirAsia was born.

“Game on. So, I went down there into Malaysia and Singapore,” McCarthy told me. “We met with the people who leased the aircraft to AirAsia which was GECAS. And we presented a business plan to the senior guy in GECAS down in Singapore and they backed us and they had a parent guarantee over the two aircraft in AirAsia and they said, ‘If you guys take over AirAsia, we would release the parent guarantee’. So, that’s how we got to buy AirAsia for the equivalent of 25 US cents.

“We did a deal with the owner of AirAsia which was a big automotive company. They made automotive products for the Proton car that’s made in Malaysia and they said, ‘Okay, this airline has 20 million in debts, we will pay off half, you inherit the other half, and you get us off the hook on these parent guarantees for the aircraft leases’. And we said okay. So, by September we had done an agreement and in December we took it over, we formally took it over.

“Tony wasn’t the millionaire I was told he was, he had to mortgage his house to insure the aircraft.”

The business, however, took off, and now has 250 brand-new A320 aircraft. McCarthy has left the board but remains a shareholder and a company adviser.  

“I was only going to have arguments with the CEO all the time because he wanted to go down a different path and I just said okay, I’m going to step off the board. But he said to me, ‘I really don’t want you to leave’. So, I stayed on as an advisor, I’m still an advisor in terms of strategy and I’m still on their safety board and so on. So, yeah and I’m down there about every six to eight weeks,” he says.

McCarthy on O’Leary

“One thing I learned from Michael was one of the best decision’s managers can take is the decision to say no to things. Not to get distracted by everything that comes your way. To say no. I used to say about Michael that he’d walk by 20 dollars in the gutter to go after one dollar of cost.

“He’d ignore revenue opportunities in order to focus everyone on cost savings. And he used to say, ‘Hang on, a dollar of cost savings ends up at a dollar on the bottom line, 20 dollars of revenue generation often ends up at zero dollars on the bottom line because you’ve spent all that effort trying to get to it and pivoting around it and everything like that’. So, you know, the simplicity of management and the ability to keep things simple is a challenge to all managers and it’s something that we try every day here. So, it’s a big one.”

Launching Dublin Aerospace in a time of crisis

In 2009, Conor McCarthy was spending much of his time in Australia, working on a major project with Qantas. As he arrived back in Dublin, he received a call from his wife Anne. “Did you hear that they are closing SRT,” she said, referring to the aircraft maintenance business that has emerged from Team Aer Lingus.

McCarthy rang one of his classmates to confirm that the premises was shutting, and that it was not merely a bargaining tool in union negotiations. At the time, Ireland was ravaged by recession.

During his visits back to Ireland, he noticed how the mood of the country had changed, how everyone was more downbeat. He looked around the country, and realised how little Ireland actually made, and how few indigenous manufacturers were left.

He wife held a similar view – “There is nothing for the kids here,” she said. So, he decided to make a play for the business. “It is literally a punt, a ten to one shot with the money,” he told his wife.

McCarthy’s own stock portfolio had suffered, but he remained reasonably wealthy. “Not only am I half as wealthy as I thought I was, I’m going to take a big chunk of it in cash and stick it into a business that I know but I also know where all the warts are,” he recalled.

“When you know a business well, you also understand where all the pitfalls are and there’s no business that doesn’t have pitfalls. So, I guess that was one of the concerns. And then we had an option, do you buy it as a going concern but take on all of the historic agreements and the historic employment contracts and all that? You might have some kind of run rate of revenue, you might have some contracts.

“Or do you just simply buy some of the tools and equipment and start from scratch? And I kind of figured, listen, this place has gone through a lot of people who are much smarter than me. It’s never made money. If I continue to do the same thing all over again, I’m not sure if it was Einstein or Freud who said if you repeat the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, that’s a sign of insanity.

“So, I went for the trying something completely different model. We built this business around the people actually. We got the tools and equipment at a reasonably decent price, although we had to pay heavily for landing gears and APU’s that we were inheriting as components. We then took out a lease on this hangar and the workshops from the DAA and you know, we got some easement there.”

“I think Covid will accelerate certain changes which are already there.”

Conor McCarthy

Instead of culling salaries, McCarthy set about culling overtime. Staff were incentivised to get the job done early, rather than allow the work to stretch out. The company also shares 10 per cent of its profits every quarter with workers. Barring 2009, when it started, the company has been profitable every year since – last year, the average pay-out to staff was €3,000.

It now employs about 450 people during its peak winter months, when airlines send many of their craft for maintenance. During busy periods, staff work six days and receive extra holidays. Everyone is aligned in the one direction, McCarthy says.

“When they are incentivised to do it smart, they figure out the smartest way of doing the job,” he says. “We don’t have anyone walking around with a clipboard in a white coat checking that people are working or checking our people sliding off for a break that they shouldn’t have. Everybody on the team is like on a trawler, they share the work when the work is there and they share the benefits. It is about alignment. We have our own internal democratically elected works council called the ERC. There are representatives from each area. We meet them every three months. We discuss everything from health and safety to future business to developments to pay and conditions. And then we have a ballot.”

The focus on costs allows the company to compete with low-cost rivals abroad. “We’re competitive. We’ve won business that would have gone to China. AirAsia, for example, ship their landing gears to Dublin and I can tell you this as a fella who wasn’t on the board when we won the contract – that was a hard-fought contract. We won contracts in the Philippines for APUs. They ship them all the way to Dublin, we pay for the shipping in our contract and we have competitors in there from China and we will still win business,” he says.

“It’s really tough. Really tough, but our people are very flexible. So, where we will pay our people what is a competitive salary for Ireland, it’ll be a huge amount more than they get paid in countries like China or Malaysia or Bulgaria. However, our people are very flexible and agile. So, what they’ll put into a nine-hour shift will be a lot more than what you’ll get out of people in those countries.”

How does he think Covid-19 will change the industry? “I think it’ll accelerate certain changes which are already there,” he says. “It’ll consolidate certain practices which were always good. It’s pushed forward the whole contactless thing. So, you know, in AirAsia, for example, we’ve gone completely contactless from the start to the finish of your journey.

“So, you check in on your mobile app, you do you own baggage tag, you do your own bag weigh and bag check, you do your own boarding card, you pass through all the gates using an electronic tag. The airports, traditionally, that might have been slow have had to adopt it. Contactless payments are the norm now.”

Tax exile? No thanks.

During his time travelling the world consulting with airlines, McCarthy’s accountant told him that if he took his holidays in Portugal, he would be non-resident for tax purposes. McCarthy said he did not want to be disincentivized to stay away from Ireland, and promptly said no.

IK: Lots of people would have just gone to Portugal or Malta?

CMcC: When I pull that door behind me at 4am to go to the airport for a red-eye and I’m gone for the week, I know that the street lights will work. I know if the house alarm goes off or we call the police they’ll call to the house. I know if there’s an ambulance required it’ll be there quicker than any other city. So, someone has to pay for those services. That is fair. So yeah, we can all whinge about the tax being where it is but bear in mind when I was a fourth-year apprentice in 1982, the tax rate was about 62 per cent in the pound above a minimum level and that level was reached very quick. I was even hitting it as a fourth-year apprentice.

IK: Do you feel that the tax rate is too high?

CMcC: I think if the Government could get the tax take per individual below 50 per cent at the high margin it would make a big difference to people psychologically. Don’t take more than half. Just take a little less than half. But I’m equally cognisant of not just the company’s balance sheet and other companies’ balance sheets that have been ravaged by the Covid pandemic, but the country’s balance sheet has been ravaged also. And we’ve done things – we’ve spent phenomenal money on PPE because we know we need it and we can’t be without it. We didn’t want to be looking like some of the countries where surgeons were bringing their own makeshift PPE to the hospital because there was none there.

Having said that, we’ve got a serious job of work now to make the public service more efficient, particularly after Covid. If we don’t make that a priority, we’re goosed. And you know, it’s crucial. As a country, it’s crucial because ultimately it feeds through.

IK: Do you think we can do that? After all, you’ve been in heavily unionised industries for a long time?

CMcC: I think we can if there’s a will at the senior level. It’s always difficult with a coalition Government and yet, I’m pretty resigned to the fact that Ireland will almost always be governed by a coalition and that hasn’t served us badly. Because at least someone keeps manners on the other and you don’t get the Il Duce effect. Having said that you know, let’s hope we settle down. The Government hasn’t settled. Let’s hope they get over these silly crises and maybe they’ll get joined-up thinking.

*****

The interview is drawing to a close. Through it, McCarthy has remained passionate and upbeat. He has scaled back some of his commitments, although he has stepped back into the CEO role at Dublin Aerospace (he had previously moved to chairman). He is travelling less with his PlaneConsult business but finds himself coming into work earlier than ever.

“I am having a ball,” he beams. “When I was travelling the world, because we’d such a young family, I would carve out the summer. So, I’ve taken all of July off for the last 20 years. And I have generally taken most of August as a semi-holiday. So, I’ll either work from our home down the country or I come in and out as necessary but I would try not to do any long-haul travel. And then I would always take the Christmas and Easter breaks off when the kids were off. When you protect that, you protect relationships. I’ve never missed one of the kid’s birthdays in 20 years.

“If you don’t protect those things, work can take over everything and you end up with a great career and no family to show for it. Or maybe a great career and a great family – you just don’t know them. I never wanted that.”