This article is a trailer urging readers to listen to my podcast that runs for as long as many feature films (90-minutes) and I believe this audience with Michael Lillis is worth the cost of your subscription.

And here’s Michael… gliding effortlessly from the apex of the Irish public service to the boardroom of Ireland’s most exciting international company. After helping to negotiate the Anglo Irish Agreement, arguably the most important treaty this state has entered into since independence, he joined Guinness Peat Aviation, the company that persuaded the world to lease aircraft from Ireland.

And all that was before he turned 40.

Making a difference must have been written in his stars: General Franco, the Spanish dictator, asked Lillis, then aged 21 and the most junior diplomat in the Irish embassy, to escort his teenage granddaughter to the opera in Madrid. Later in his diplomatic career he shared wine and a tete a tete with the Pope in the Vatican. As an Irish ambassador and UN diplomat, he drank vintage Bacardi rum and smoked fine Havana cigars until dawn with President Fidel Castro in Cuba. On successive nights.

In South America, Lillis ran a team of 90 Irish repo-men – experts in repossessing aircraft – to seize 60 aircraft protected by armed guards. Lillis made it happen by loading briefcases with cash.

The late, great writer Tom Wolfe might have had Michael Lillis in mind when he dreamed up the title A Man in Full:  there is nothing lily-livered or mealy-mouthed about Michael Lillis. He is a man of action and honour.

His father, a civil servant with a science degree, was from West Clare, his mother, a school teacher, was from West Cork. But don’t judge Lillis by his sophistication or intellect: when he was five years old young Michael sold his grannie’s banbhs in Macroom Fair.

“I developed infant TB when I was one year old so I was sent down to my granny’s farm which was in a very simple and not very prosperous part of west Cork but the result of it was that for various reasons the school, the local school, for example, had been shut down,” he told me on this week’s podcast. ” School was gone… most of the local community life had pretty well disappeared…I didn’t go to school till I was 12, Sam.”

Michael told me his parents would visit in the summer months. His mother taught maths and his father, whose family were schoolteachers going back seven generations, had taught him Greek and Latin, which was a Godsend later, particularly in his diplomatic career.

At the age of 12 when his grandmother died Michael arrived in Dublin and found himself with a thousand other boys in the Christian Brothers school in Synge Street. He excelled in exams, both in school and in UCD before passing the civil service exam and joining what was then called the Department of External Affairs.  Within a year, at  21-years-old, he was posted to Madrid.

Here is a sample of our conversation on that topic:

Michael Lillis (ML): That was the time of General Franco and I was in Madrid, we had a tiny embassy, two diplomats and my two bosses had very bad health so most of the time as a 21-year-old or 23, 24, I was what was called chargé d’affaires.  I was the boss.  I could declare war.

Sam Smyth (SS): And you learned Spanish, I presume?

ML: Yeah, I learned Spanish quite well because in those days you had no choice; you had to because people wouldn’t deal with you. It’s quite different nowadays but in the course of it I actually got to know General Franco.

And the reason was I got a call from his head of staff to say that the Caudillo would like you to come to dinner tonight and to escort his granddaughter to the opera.  I’d never met any of these people but I showed up in my white tie which was a very uncomfortable garment by the way, nobody wears it nowadays and I was introduced to Franco who was a very, a very small man and who obviously was suffering from Parkinson’s.  And I’d heard the rumour to that effect but his hands were trembling and all the rest of it and he said that he wanted me to take his granddaughter to the opera.  And would I agree. And I said, ‘Excellency, I’m honoured,’ and I went off with her in the General’s Hispano Suiza which was the most extraordinary car in the world. I could not afford a bike in Madrid I was so badly paid. We went to the opera accompanied by what’s called a duenna and she was the lady in escort. She was a Marquese.

SS: A chaperone.

ML: A chaperone with a veil over her face and we sat in the royal box and her ladyship sat behind us to make sure I didn’t get up to anything and … which I can assure you I’m certainly not going to do anything of that sort.

It turned out the General had an ulterior motive. After the opera when the young accompanied couple came back to the presidential palace for dinner, the entire Franco family were waiting for them. Franco explained that he wanted his granddaughter to learn English in a good Catholic country like Ireland and asked for Michael’s assistance finding a school and help with the arrangements. Although making international phone calls from the embassy was discouraged because of the expense Michael came up with a result. The dictator’s granddaughter was enrolled into a Loreto school in Dublin.

Michael Lillis: So, I was invited to dinner again and he was very courteous and old-fashioned in his way.  He said to me how much he admired President de Valera who was of course, in his view, of Spanish extraction himself. He invited me, when dinner was over, to sit beside him on the sofa and he started to talk about the O’Duffy Brigade.

SS: And were you speaking Spanish, I suppose?

ML: Oh yeah.  For years I have … even today I think in Spanish. He said to me what had I heard about the Irish brigade in the Civil War.  And I said, you know, ‘Your Excellency, obviously it was very important, personally I didn’t particularly admire it,’ but when you’re a diplomat, you have to be very careful and respectful.  And he said, he’s looking at me very carefully, he said, ‘that was a very complicated business’.

The life and times of an international diplomat

After Spain, Michael then moved to the Washington embassy where he served from 1976 until 1979. He worked very closely with John Hume and then foreign minister Garret Fitzgerald on a project called The Carter Initiative which the British opposed strenuously. Spearheaded by the ‘Four Horsemen’ – Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill,  Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Daniel Moynihan and Governor Hugh Carey of New York – they pressed President Jimmy Carter to take a position on the North for the first time that was different to the British position. Lillis got to know Carter well and that helped open the way for other changes

Sam Smyth (SS): Then you were one of the key negotiators on the Anglo Irish Agreement …

Michael Lillis (ML): I was one of four … we’re now in Baggot Street doing this interview but it started a few yards away from here in what was then called the Grey Door and where I went to lunch with the deputy head of the [British] cabinet office, a man called David Goodall.  He died four or five years ago.  And I took him for a walk after lunch along that stretch of the Grand Canal between Baggot Street and Leeson Street Bridges. 

I used the opportunity having checked this with both Hume and FitzGerald to urge on the British the need for a completely new initiative on the North at a time when things were very bad between London and Dublin.  There had been problems about the hunger strikes, there was problems about the position Ireland took during the Falklands War, which kind of shut down all communication with Thatcher. FitzGerald came in and we were trying to get discussions going again. And that started a negotiation which went on for two years.  And our leader on the official side was a great man called Dermot Nally who passed away some years ago and Sean Donlon, Noel Dorr and myself; we were the Irish team.  On the British side there was a man called Robert Armstrong.

SS: Cabinet Secretary.

ML: He was Cabinet Secretary, and his deputy was this guy David Goodall who was also deputy in the Foreign Office.

SS: A book published recently of David Goodall’s memoirs revealed that he had a lot of time for you, and subsequently you became very personally friendly..

ML: Well, particularly when the negotiations were over, he’s an interesting man and I used to spend time with him, he lived in Yorkshire and he would come here.  Personally he had huge interest in chapters of Irish history, particularly 1798.  His family were actually from both sides of the rising in 1798 and they fought against each other in Wexford.

After the Anglo Irish Agreement was signed Michael’s friend, history professor Ronan Fanning, sourced an original Wexford pike as a memento for David Goodall. But there was a difficulty in getting it to England.

ML: I got the Taoiseach, for once, to use his influence and get Aer Lingus to allow me to carry it inside the plane but when we got to the airport on the other side I couldn’t find any taxi that would let me carry the bloody pike. Finally I found one and took it to David’s house. He was thrilled. Goodall was a pretty small guy but he danced around the flat and he was demonstrating to us how his side of the family would take the fella on the other side off the horse using that part of the stem to pull him down and then you give him the business end; he was ecstatic.

SS: He knew how a pike was used then.

ML: Oh, he sure did.  He knew a lot of things because David had been, he was very involved in, you know, British intelligence and war and …

SS: He was in the belly of the beast in Britain.

ML: He was, yeah. He was chairman of GCHQ.

ML: I used to tell him, ‘I know you’re listening to even my thoughts, David.’

SS: I was going to say that because successive Irish Governments assumed every communication, every message was being monitored.

ML: Well, there’s no doubt about that.

SS: By the British.

ML: Yeah. Now, what we ended up doing was when we were doing the negotiation was we had to send a courier to the embassy in London carrying messages which were actually already typed up. Because, you know, even our codes at the time were completely and absolutely blasted by them. 

SS: Would there have been a Good Friday Agreement without Anglo Irish Agreement?

ML: Well I think most people including those who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement have said on the record that there would not have been.  And I’ll try and that say in one word, Sam: tectonic. Could you imagine if we made a treaty with the British in which we accepted as an obligation that anything that involved the six counties of Munster, right, and the Irish Government, which was not external relations but everything from human rights to economic business to justice and security, anything which comes up in everybody’s life every day, we could not take an initiative in Munster without first of all telling the British, consulting them and offering them the opportunity to give us their views and objections and ideas.  It’s unbelievable.

SS: And Mrs Thatcher agreed that.

ML: She did. She believed that she did not yield an inch on sovereignty but, believe me, it was a breach of sovereignty and that changed everything. Because before that, as you know very well, the Unionists inside the North had a veto and you couldn’t try any proposal or initiative and of course they would always veto it.

SS: And the veto worked no matter who was in Downing Street, Labour or Tory?

ML: Yeah, exactly. And the Anglo Irish Agreement put an end to that. In the light of history, the most important single thing in the Anglo Irish Agreement, I think, was that in its first article, 1C, it said that the British Government accepted as a treaty obligation – in other words a legal obligation to support Irish unity, if the people of the North said they wanted it.  Now, that was unthinkable.  And that was what John Hume used in his long discussions with Gerry Adams and Hume always said the Anglo-Irish Agreement was the at the centre of his efforts to persuade the Provisional IRA to ceasefire.

*****

When the Anglo Irish Agreement was signed in 1985 Michael Lillis had not yet turned forty. He had been at the centre of what is arguably the most significant diplomatic achievement of any Irish government since independence. He spent the following two years in what was called The Bunker, a secretariat that was set up in Belfast very much against the wishes of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and the Northern Ireland Office. Michael Lillis was the first Irish head of the secretariat.

SS: You were embedded.

ML: Yeah, I was.  And we had a tough time for quite a while because we had protests round the clock and in huge numbers outside the premises and we were day and night negotiating with a set of senior British opposite numbers about all of the issues that came up in Northern Ireland…and a lot of good things came from that.

In 1987 Charles Haughey was re-elected Taoiseach. While he had opposed the Anglo Irish Agreement in opposition, once elected he worked it. Lillis was not party political and told Garret Fitzgerald that he had never voted Fine Gael. Yet he felt closely associated with the outgoing Taoiseach and wrote to Charles Haughey from Belfast suggesting that someone he knew personally should be in the job because of its sensitivity. Haughey was gracious about it and offered him the post of ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

ML: And I had a great time in Geneva, in particular because we had the presidency of the EU during that period and that was a very interesting moment because Ireland wasn’t quite as prosperous in those days as it became subsequently. This was in ’87 and ’88 and there were only 12 member states.

Through the 1980s US president Ronald Reagan was pushing to have a mission to explore the situation of Human Rights in Cuba. The UN Commission on Human Rights meets in Geneva and Michael became part of the UN delegation on Cuba.

ML: I was very interested in this stuff because I’ve always been fascinated with Latin America, I wasn’t supporting the hard-line embargo of the US which I always found made no sense. I mean the more involvement you have with the Cubans and the more involvement the Cuban people have with the rest of the world, you know, there will be an evolution which will lead to a greater openness.

Ireland did not have an embassy in Cuba and Lillis tried to prepare for the trip by speaking to the foreign ministries of the other EU member states but he didn’t get much useful information. He approached a Spanish friend who was Papal Nuncio to the UN.

ML: I said to him, ‘I’m very frustrated…’ but I said, ‘I know you guys have more information about everything than almost any mission or any agency on earth,’ and anyway he went off and came back and said, oh, the Secretary of State was called Cardinal Casaroli and he said another guy, the Cardinal or Archbishop of Milan, was like the Foreign Minister, they would receive me for a day. I was delighted. 

Lillis received a valuable six-hour briefing on Castro in the Vatican. Around two o’clock in the afternoon he was informed that his Holiness would like him to join him in his office for a brief meeting.

SS: This is John Paul II?

ML: John Paul II, yeah, and I was introduced to him actually by a friend who was a Papal Nuncio in Geneva who was there as well. John Paul’s knowledge of English was good but not great, so we managed through the variety of languages that we could come up with between us.

SS: Polish was his native tongue wasn’t it?

ML: Oh, Polish yeah. And, you know, a very proud Pole, but we managed a bit of French and actually quite a bit of Latin, because my father taught me more Latin than anyone I’ve ever met, and we would come back and forth to each other in Latin and he was very conversant with the Communist system …

SS: He grew up in it.

ML: He did and he was a very smart man and he obviously understood how they operate and he was sort of giving me advice as to how to preserve my independence when I was there and all the pressures they would put on me and the rest of it and how to try and get through to your interlocutor.  So, listen, it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. 

Castro personally greeted the UN delegation at the airport when they arrived, by Aeroflot, in Cuba. Michael chose to visit prisons because of the large number of prisoners of conscience. A few days after their arrival Michael was approached by a man who didn’t identify himself and was told that the Comandante would like him to turn up at a certain house and that transport would be sent for him. He was picked up around 10 o’clock at night and he spent several hours with Fidel Castro but they were not alone…

ML: He brought in the chief justice, he got him to demonstrate to me why Cuba is the most free and open country on earth. He called in the attorney general, he called in various other people and, you know, they were all trembling in his presence. I mean terrified and I had no compunction whatever, I just asked the obvious questions about what you could and you couldn’t do, and I mean the simple fact is sadly for the people of Cuba, the system is tyrannical and it is absolute and there is no such thing as freedom. And saying that, I mean, I also say the Americans have been very unwise in insisting on embargos and cutting them off in all kinds of ways.

SS: Backing them into a corner

ML: Exactly. But coming on about four o’clock in the morning, Castro changed his tone. 

He started talking to me about religion because he got the impression somehow that I was deeply, you know, I won’t say pious but – certainly not.  But that I was kind of very committed on that point and he started talking to me about his own education, asked me about mine and, you know, he was from a very upper-class family of course and he was educated by the Jesuits and by the way he spoke of them with reverence.

SS: And you a Christian Brothers boy…

ML: A Christian Brothers boy, you know, because I was thinking myself, you bloody Jesuits, you’re all the same!  He was talking about how his schooling went and how he had read very widely in theology and all the rest of it.  At this stage we were talking, he wasn’t just making speeches. And we got on extremely well.  And by the way we were drinking the most superb vintage rum made … because they took over the Bacardi distilleries and he explained this to me, he said, ‘We have kept some of the oldest rum that the Bacardis had made in the 19th century,’ and that’s what we were quaffing, you know? Only the best for the leader of the Communist Party.

And then we were also puffing on the best Cuban cigars, the pair of us.  And we were in very good form, and then he said to me, coming on six or seven in the morning and the dawn, you know, beautiful on the Caribbean  and he said to me: ‘I enjoyed this conversation, would you come around again?’ 

I said, ‘Excellency, I would be honoured and thrilled.’  So, I had another night with him.  And it went on again until dawn but actually he, I think rather sincerely, was trying to persuade me that he was carrying out what basically was the mission of Jesus Christ.

SS: And no one in Cuba was going to contradict him.

ML: Certainly not.  

Working with Tony Ryan

Peter Sutherland, who had been Attorney General during the negotiation of the Anglo Irish Agreement and had subsequently joined the board of Guinness Peat Aviation, offered Michael Lillis the job of managing director in Latin America in 1988. He would be  based in Shannon.

SS: Did you feel no other challenges in diplomacy would interest you at that time?

ML: What stays with me from that time is that I felt I’ve never been in the private sector and when you’re looking at the private sector from you know, a civil service position, you’re kind of saying to yourself: would I survive in that world which is basically, you know, wild beasts consuming each other…

SS: Predatory.

ML: Predatory, exactly.  So, I certainly would have doubted that.  And I wanted to have a go.

SS: Did you feel I’m as good as any of those guys?

ML: Well, I felt I would like to test myself.  First of all I went down to meet Tony Ryan at his house in Tipperary and obviously Peter Sutherland had spoken to him and  Garret FitzGerald was on the board of GPA at the time as were a number of very prominent British businessmen.  And, you know, Tony’s kind of attitude was here’s this fella, he’s a diplomat, what the hell does he know about the real world?  So, he started out on that particular wavelength and he says to me ‘When I was eight, I was selling calves in Limerick Fair,’ he said, ‘What would you know about that?’  Well, I said, I said, ‘When I was five, I was selling my grandmother’s pigs, piglets, banbhs in Macroom Fair going in at six o’clock in the morning and I was doing it on my own, by the way, a little boy, and I was beating all these crooks and chancers and had to hold my own, and I’m not saying I did hold my own, because in some cases I think I didn’t.’  But I said, ‘I do know that world and I love it.  And my vision of his country is basically we’re all of farming stock,’

SS: And was Tony from a modest background?

ML: Extremely, extremely modest.

SS: And you liked him as a man?

ML: Oh very much so.  I mean he’s a difficult fella.  God knows you wouldn’t want to be on the other side because he was – as he had to be – ruthless and highly creative in his ruthlessness as he was in every other way.

SS: Well he had taken this company from I presume a few of them in an office ringing people up to …

ML: Number one in the world.

SS: … an international company, the most … well, did they set the plan for what is now a huge international industry?

ML: Basically it was invented by Tony. I mean there’s one other opponent he had in California but Tony basically invented the business of aircraft leasing and aircraft leasing is now an Irish industry.  It is completely dominated by Irish people. 85 per cent of aircraft leasing in the world which is half of the aeroplanes that are flying around the skies, 85% of that is Irish-owned.

SS: Now the one thing I was going to say always fascinated me, I remember seeing a film once called Repo Man …

ML: Oh yeah.

SS: Which was about guys repossessing cars in America.  Apparently if somebody is not paying their lease or their rent on the plane, you have to send men in to repossess them.

ML: In the case of aircraft leasing you have to measure risk and risk is very volatile.  And, for example, in the period I was working for GPA at the end of the 80s and 1990, Brazil, for example, where we had quite a large business, was going through one of its crises. The president was impeached and his bagman owned one of the largest airlines in the country, and used the airline to basically steal seven or eight billion dollars from the Brazilian Government.

Between the period I still worked for GPA, and then when GPA’s assets were bought by Jack Welch’s General Electric,  I continued working for General Electric. In the case of the Brazilian company that we’re talking about, which was called VASP and based in São Paulo state.  We had 14 aircraft, so it was quite a substantial…

SS: How much would those planes be worth? 20-25 million each?

ML: Each, yeah, that’s right.

We eventually had to repo over 60 aircraft.  Now multiply 60 by 25 and that’s, you know, one and a half billion US dollars of assets and we had to get them out under appallingly difficult circumstances. The government was backing the kind of the criminal elements who had taken over the airlines and eventually,  and we had a fair bit of success in the courts but in one particular case, which is the VASP case I mentioned, we were trying to repossess the aircraft for a period of about two months. We had to have crews for each one of the aircraft and back-ups available for whenever we got a chance to take them out.  And we had all these people in hotels in São Paulo.

SS: What are you talking about? About 30 people or something?

ML: Oh, more. Probably in the end it was around 90 and they all were in the same hotel in São Paulo and they were all Irishmen, I think they were, every single one of them was an Irishman. For a large part they were retired Aer Lingus people or … but you see there’s always been an industry here of people who are available to the world, not just to Irish airlines but to the world and they’re well-known to be very proficient, you know, in their business which is getting aeroplanes when it’s necessary and I was in charge of this particular operation at the time.  And I always knew where to find these lads.  Especially after about two o’clock in the morning, they were always in the same nightclub.  So, eventually I saw an opportunity …

SS: In São Paulo?

ML: In São Paulo.  And eventually I saw the opportunity to do deals with the people who worked for the security at the airports.

SS: ‘Do deals’ I presume that means squeezing a fistful of money into their hands.

ML: You had to do that, yeah.  And these aircraft they were all F1, it was a cargo airport, not passenger, just cargo.  They were all kept together under armed guard and finally it took a bit of let’s call it negotiation and we had to get the guys with the rifles off the base.  We had to get the co-operation of the control tower and we had to shut down the airport for the whole night and all of that was a commercial business.

On one night, a particular night, it started earlier because I’d always been warning these guys, ‘Now, just be ready.  If we need you to come to the airport.’

SS: So, don’t go out and get pissed and whatever.

ML: Well, you’d hope that they wouldn’t.  And I didn’t test their breath, may I say, but we got them all out onto the aircraft, and it’s a sight I’ll never forget.  It went on for probably a couple of hours because, you know, the aircraft had to be fuelled, you needed to file a flight plan, they were all flying to airports in the Caribbean, then they would fly on somewhere. But I remember it vividly, you know, watching the scene at the airport itself, as one after another of sixty aircraft flew off into the darkness for the Caribbean. 

SS: I remember in the Falklands, the BBC reporter who couldn’t reveal how many planes said, ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all in again.’  So … 

ML: It would be like that.

When the highly anticipated GPA flotation crashed in 1992, corporate predator Jack Welch was waiting in the wings.

Michael Lillis: What actually happened was they bought nearly all of the aircraft in Tony’s enormous fleet of aeroplanes and it became the origin of the company called GCAS which is probably one of the most successful units of  General Electric and most of the employees of GPA were transferred over to GE.  And, I mean, that was an interesting experience.  It became you’re moving from a pretty lively Irish corporation, it was one of the liveliest in the world, over to an enormous corporation called General Electric and it was a difficult transition because American corporate life is actually pretty dull and it’s predictable.

Sam Smyth: And it’s designed that way, I think.

ML: It is.

*****

His high-flying life in diplomacy prepped him for a stellar life in aviation leasing and spending years in Florida, Latin and South America. He is now an advisor to the Irish aircraft leasing company, Avolon, on Latin America.

ML: And that is the most enjoyable experience I’ve had in business.  And  I’m proud of it. I can now say I’m going to finally retire at the end of the year and I really mean it.

SS: As a former senior diplomat you can see the public interest side of most things, and as a senior executive in a very successful company you understand the importance of creating success and profits: What is the tug between those two interests?  You know, the public interest and the private interest.

ML: Well, I think if you don’t understand that business is only possible on the basis of profit, you are wasting your time. You have to accept that that is fundamental and once you’ve got that in your head, you possibly can contribute usefully.  In the case of the public service success doesn’t come in the same way as it does in business.  In business, it’s bottom line; in public service, it’s the acceptance of compromise between starting points which could be widely different.

SS: Everything has to be paid for at the end of the day.

ML: Everything has to be paid for but I mean something like my own experience of it, whether it’s with the Americans or with the British, it requires the same level of determination.  And you actually must be determined that you’re going to win, otherwise you’re not going to be much good in either case.  And I’m not saying that I’ve been hugely successful, but I have had some success and I think it is largely a result of determination.

SS: Can business and finance and doing deals ever be as intellectually satisfying as, say, negotiating a treaty that serves the public good over generations –  if that doesn’t sound like a very loaded question?

ML: The answer to that is: never. The government side of these things is much better.

SS: Did a bigger pay packet in business compensate for the loss of job satisfaction that you had as a public servant?

ML: They’re different and I think the job satisfaction of doing something which you’ve been privileged to do, like, say the Anglo Irish Agreement is different.  I’ve never had anything like it.

SS: You’re a proud patriot and avoided public recognition of your accomplishments in public life and business: Which of those achievements are you most proud of Michael?

ML: I would say the Anglo Irish Agreement. You and I know the situation very well. Things could have got much worse than they did and I think that they didn’t get to turn out as quickly as we hoped to be successful. But the fact is that they could have been much worse, no doubt in my mind. We could have gone to civil war and complete chaos here. And I think a lot of people working together, good people, have helped to stop that happening.

*****

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