Ryanair Boss And His Fine Gael Pets Laugh At Teachers - Time To Teach Fine Gael A Lesson!

Michael O’Leary recently spoke at the election campaign launch of Fine Gael Minister Peter Burke. The wealthy Ryanair boss said he “wouldn’t employ teachers to get much going”. I don’t think he knows much about teachers. I am sure, however, that he and Fine Gael need to be taught a number of lessons.

The only teachers O’Leary has ever met are the ones who had to suffer his presence when he went to fee paying Clongowes Wood school.

This is Michael O’Leary and this is Fine Gael. Despite O’Leary’s well-cultivated rough edges he is a privately educated nepo baby who has nothing but the most sneering contempt for working class people.

The arrogance and privilege of the boss class oozes from everything he says - Fine Gael and Michael O’Leary - they are well matched. O’Leary probably looks in the mirror and sees an “entrepreneur”.

We see a greedy anti-union boss. We see someone who despises workers and immigrants too. Terrorists, he says, will “generally be males of a Muslim persuasion”. Once more - Fine Gael and Michael O’Leary are well matched. Think for example of Simon Harris blaming immigrants for the housing crisis his party created or Leo Varadkar saying that it is “only natural” that we would favour Ukrainian refugees over other, non-European refugees.

Some lessons in basic human rights are in order here. Definitely time for them to go back to school.

We see someone who thinks rules are for little people. Has he still got the taxi licence he got so he could skip up the bus lanes? O’Leary couldn’t care less about ordinary people trying to get around the streets of Dublin. Once again: Fine Gael and Michael O’Leary are well matched.

At a recent public meeting in Swords, Fingal East candidate, Alan Farrell, was making promises about Metro North while admitting that the project was actually forty years late. He seemed to have forgotten that his party has been in power for much of that time. Lies, false promises - “Sure isn’t that what you say at election time?” Well, even election-time lies need to follow basic common sense. Maybe they skipped that lesson in school.

When we look at O’Leary we see a mouthy demagogue who makes up his own facts. Exactly the kind of “student” who learns little and makes life miserable for others around him. In the middle of a housing crisis he is still hoarding at least twenty-three empty family homes in Swords.

In a soft-soap radio interview on the Hard Shoulder last month he called People Before Profit “the people’s front of North Korea”. Mouthy, sneering, smart arsed. A pup. For the sake of any right-thinking, decent person in this country he needs to be taught a serious lesson.

Those houses need to be taken off him immediately. And again - Fine Gael and Michael O’Leary are well-matched. Fine Gael have been in office for 13 years. In that time, homelessness has risen from 3,808 to 14,486. Restricting supply is good for business. O’Leary hoards family homes while Fine Gael sit on their hands and wait for the private sector to make up the deficit of 256,000 homes identified by the Housing Commission. Teach them a lesson. Vote them out.

When we look at O’leary we see a climate change denier. He spends his time on the airwaves name-calling people objecting to his profit-crazed airport expansion “local loonies”. The real loony is the one who once claimed that climate change was “complete and utter rubbish”.

I would have him in my geography class if I thought he would learn anything. I fear he is too far gone at this stage. Fine Gael, likewise, could not care less about climate change. They have no plans to cut the national herd, they’re happy to allow unrestricted passenger growth in air travel, happy to allow data centres draw 21% of the power from the national grid, happy to wait another 40 years for the metro and other public transport.

Ruling class toffs like O’Leary and Fine Gael need to be taught a lesson. O’Leary’s staff need to rise up, join a union and put him in his place. The people of Ireland can act too.

First, we can vote for socialist candidates who will fight for our class, who fight against Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, on 29th November. Second, we need to organise and fight for a rational, socialist system where workers call the shots and entitled parasites like O’Leary have no place.

That is a lesson they badly need. In all of the lessons that matter: our grade for Fine Gael and Michael O’Leary is F minus. Time they were expelled.