Stelios Haji-Ioannou of Easyjet: I was asked ‘how are you going to fly into Belfast with an orange airline?'

Irish Times

20 hours ago

Stelios Haji-Ioannou's interest in Ireland came in stages – first when
EasyJet
began flying out of
Belfast
in the late 1990s and then, more importantly, after he met a Kerry woman, Orla Murphy, and, later, became father to Aria, the couple's seven-year-old daughter.
The
Greek Cypriot
billionaire knows a few things about divided islands: 'One of my earliest memories as a kid is the invasion of Cyprus in 1974. I remember we were all scared,' he says, 'it was a very vivid memory.'
Today, Haji-Ioannou – better known simply as Stelios – has created the inaugural
North
–South Business Co-operation Awards with Co-operation Ireland to encourage cross-Border entrepreneurship and start-ups on the island of Ireland.
His connection with Ireland goes back to the early days of the low-cost carrier EasyJet. In 1995, he had considered flying out of Belfast but shied away because 'it was considered always a difficult route'.
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Fortunes, however, changed after the 1998 Belfast Agreement, with EasyJet beginning with three flights a day from Belfast. Today, it carries seven out of every 10 people who fly into or out of Northern Ireland.
Stelios Haji-Ioannou of EasyJet at Glin Castle. Photograph: Mark Hennessy
Remembering the early days, he tells The Irish Times: 'I remember one of the comments in '98 was, 'How are you going to fly into Belfast with an orange airline?'.
I mean, can you imagine?'
The billionaire is speaking in a bedroom in Glin Castle, one of three temporarily converted into offices while the family holiday in Co Limerick on the banks of the Shannon, in the ancestral home of the Knights of Glin.
The historic location – the home of the Black Knight of Glin, one of the Fitzgeralds of Desmond, since the early 14th Century – is popular with the family because it 'is close to home' for his partner, whom he met after she had moved to Monaco.
'My daughter's name is Aria, A-R-I-A. We chose a name equally easy to pronounce in Greek and English. We tried others, but they weren't so easy to pronounce,' Haji-Ioannou says.
In time, he hopes his daughter will take charge of the family's philanthropic arm, the Stelios Foundation: 'I wanted to do something more substantial in Ireland because, obviously, I'm spending time here.
'I have family here now. One day, hopefully, this foundation will be run by her, and I want to have a bigger project in Ireland.'
Stelios Haji-Ioannou is no longer involved as an executive in EasyJet. Photograph: Chris Radcliffe/Bloomberg
Many of his relatives left Cyprus after the 1974 invasion. In 2004, he returned after the border crossings that divided the Mediterranean island were opened: 'It was a time when I had started seriously to think about giving back to society.'
So began in 2008 the Stelios Bi-Communal Business Co-Operation Awards, which offers more than €400,000 in prizes annually to Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot business people who are prepared to work together.
It started quietly because he was not sure how welcome the awards would be: 'Because very often in Cyprus, there is misinformation that, you know, you're a traitor if you're doing business with the other side.'
Bar Covid interruptions, the awards have flourished. Winners like prizes, he says with a smile: 'But the other thing they like is the endorsement, the clarification that it's actually approved, it's legal, it's lawful to do business with the other side.'
The idea to bring it to Ireland came after Haji-Ioannou listened to a speech from former Irish ambassador to London and Washington Dan Mulhall at a lunch in Monaco attended by the principality's Prince Albert.
'I approached him, and I said, 'I'm doing this in Cyprus. Do you think it might work in Ireland?' Immediately, he said 'yes', and the rest is history. He introduced us to Ian Jeffers of Co-Operation Ireland,' he says.
The awards will be made in Castle Leslie in Co Monaghan in October: 'Hundreds of applications have been downloaded, so people are thinking about it. Hopefully, we're going to have a good set of first winners and then they will become the ambassadors.'
Today, he divides his time in three – a third is spent on the Easy family of brands, a third goes on his philanthropic work and the remainder on investments that have diversified his interests far beyond aviation.
No longer involved as an executive in EasyJet, he still gets 25c for every passenger the airline flies. Last year, it carried more than 70 million passengers: 'The best decision I ever made after creating EasyJet was to keep the name in my own company.'
Aviation is getting tougher, with higher fuel costs and future emissions charges, but Haji-Ioannou sees no return to the crippling charges that passengers paid in an era before EasyJet and Ryanair.
Questioned about his one-time direct opponent,
Michael O'Leary
of Ryanair, Haji-Ioannou says: 'He's made a lot of money, so I think he's a very successful businessman. There's no doubt about it.'
The two men clashed repeatedly and bitterly during the 1990s and 2000s, with the Greek Cypriot once calling Ryanair's customer service 'appalling', while O'Leary had to apologise for calling him a liar.
'He's made a lot of money for himself, for his shareholders. Some of the rhetoric is designed to reduce customer expectations. He has this philosophy that if you lower the expectations of the customer, you can lower your costs.
'I remember O'Leary as an accountant, ex-KPMG who was very shy and didn't talk to the media. He's become this very, very prominent personality largely because the media give him a lot of time,' he says.
'I haven't spoken to him for years. In the early days we used to every now and then meet or speak. Nothing personal. Because I don't have a day-to-day role in EasyJet, I don't have a reason to speak to Michael O'Leary.'