Gavan Reilly: The best way to act in Ireland… put ads on American TV?

Michael O’Leary’s “feud” with Elon Musk last week meant that when the Ryanair boss delivered another media broadside on Monday morning, it went a little bit under the radar. Newsrooms had already spent their ‘caring about Ryanair’ credits on the confected nonsense from the previous week – their ‘row’ merely amounted to two billionaires calling each other names on Twitter – and I would comfortably bet that neither Musk nor O’Leary will ever cross each other’s minds ever again.

Anyway, the media had reached short-term boredom with Ryanair come Monday morning, when the airline was announcing its latest quarterly results, and the biggest ‘news line’ to come out of the press conference was a warning from O’Leary about the passenger cap at Dublin Airport.

This has been a hobby horse for the Mullingar man: the government pledged to scrap it a year ago, but hasn’t yet published the law to do so.

Now, he was warning about the Department of Transport being sued – in American courts – by a coalition of airlines who might be on the cusp of losing their valuable landing slots in Dublin Airport, which is disproportionately important in the American market because of the U.S. pre-clearance. They say the passenger cap in Dublin is already illegal, and the coalition’s failure to remove it is now an illegitimate commercial impediment to them.

That much wasn’t ‘new’ either – the airlines concerned revealed two weeks ago that they were lodging the court action (Ryanair even helpfully sent a press release to let the Irish media know about it).

But here’s what most observers missed – the unusual methods that O’Leary promised in trying to prompt some action.

If the government has not published legislation to meet its pledge within the next six weeks, O’Leary will take out advertising about the matter on Fox News.

Why? Because in the middle of March, the Taoiseach has to sit down with Donald Trump, and the President (despite some public grievances) is still an avid watcher of that channel.

While it’s an inventive proposal, it’s not unprecedented.

A friend who works in communications once told me that – back in the 2000s, when Facebook had no transparency behind its advertisers – he would target political advertising specifically at people who marked their workplace as ‘Houses of the Oireachtas’. Nobody else was doing it, so the costs were low, but the political influence of the target market was high.

It’s merely a new version of an established older tactic. Businesses pay to advertise in the Meath Chronicle, or on LMFM, specifically because the audience is based within their geographical footprint. People advertise in trade magazines to get to specific viewers.

Professional lobbyists in America have, for years, advertised on Washington’s local TV channels specifically to target those with influence in the capital and Capitol.

But what does it say that an Irish billionaire reckons the best way to influence things in his own country is to advertise on American TV, hoping simply to attract the specific eyeballs of Donald Trump? And what does it say about Irish governance, that there’s more likelihood of action by getting Trump onside than by lobbying Ireland’s own government?