Or anything else. It was not until the age of nearly 40 that he met the woman he was to marry, Anita Farrell. "I generally get on very well with women, but I used to work seven days a week and usually 16-hour days. I had no time for girlfriends. I didn't have girlfriends for 10 or 15 years." They wed in 2004 and their first child, Matthew, was born last September. He did not find a lot of time, he admits, for changing nappies.
Ask him about the future and his thoughts turn ineluctably to Ryanair. Within a decade, he predicts, all Ryanair's flights will be free, with the costs being paid through the ancilliary profits from in-flight services and the rest. Might not action to curb climate change affect all that?