THE SATURDAY PROFILE: Emmet Oliver describes Gordon Colleary, the man who engineered a small-scale social revolution
Consieer the contrasting fortunes this week of two pioneers of the Irish travel trade. In London, the king of the no-frills sound bite, Michael O'Leary, was announcing a €10billion deal for Ryanair to the international press.
The brash and often bumptious chief executive, told reporters the company would use its new fleet of 150 Boeing 737s to become nothing less than the biggest airline in Europe.
Ryanair's well-oiled publicity machine beamed the announcement and O'Leary's now ubiquitous image around the world, with several television networks, including Sky News, giving the story top billing.
O'Leary and Ryanair have used the cheap and cheerful formula to expand out from a relatively meagre foothold in Dublin into a genuine world aviation player. Pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap has worked. You can now fly from Dublin to London for €10, subject to availability of course!
But the formula is not new. Not in Ireland. Not in the travel business.
Back in Dublin, another buccaneer of the travel business (who also seems to have an aversion to ties), USIT boss Gordon Colleary, was holed up in his office on College Green having an altogether different sort of week.
The formula of cheaper fares, which has become the mantra of Ryanair, Easyjet and Go, was long the marketing spiel and core philosophy of Colleary and his managers at USIT. He used to fly students to London for £4.15p for God's sake!
However, while O'Leary was announcing the greatest expansion yet of his low-cost carrier, Colleary, was negotiating away a business he has spent over 30 years carefully constructing.
Unlike O'Leary and other younger entrepreneurs, he constructed USIT - a name known to virtually everyone who attended a third-level college in the last 30 years - by avoiding publicity stunts, press conferences, contrived confrontations and, mercifully, blue rugby jerseys.
As he told this newspaper back in the early 1980s: "I don't believe in the brash approach. We offer a fare, and that's it."
The ironic thing about Colleary is his face should be ubiquitous. In a small way - and he would be the last one to trumpet this publicly - Colleary engineered a small-scale social revolution by driving USIT for more than 30 years.
Once again to draw the parallel, just as Ryanair gave the less well off in Ireland and Britain the chance to travel to London or Dublin for next to nothing, Colleary did something similar at USIT by giving Irish students the chance to broaden their perspectives by travelling the world at knock-down rates.
Irish students pre-USIT were a relatively sheltered group and often the only time anyone went abroad was to emigrate. USIT changed all that. Yes, they made plenty of money and nobody was doing it for selfless reasons, but a great opportunity - the opportunity to travel - was given to thousands.
YOU can test this theory by asking younger friends when they first travelled to the US, Italy, Spain or France and who arranged the deal for them. Most likely they will mention things like hostels, dirty trains, the ISIC card, the J1 and . . . USIT. Ask them about Gordon Colleary and you will probably get a blank stare.
Asked once would he consider putting his name to his travel business, a la Tony Ryan, he replied "No, nothing like that, nothing with my name on it."
Colleary next week is expected to preside over the end of this mini-revolution. USIT is in deep financial trouble. OK, not for the first time, but this time it seems to be different, and possibly fatal.
Student Travel Australia (STA), for years Colleary's relentless competitor, is expected to take USIT over. USIT got into trouble after its US arm, Council Travel, plunged into the red following September 11th.
Margins in the student travel business are always very tight and any significant squeeze on cash flow can put a company into serious trouble. However, Colleary's ambition for many years was to take over Council. But doing it shortly before September 11th was a cruel fate indeed.
While USIT had been profitable over recent years under Colleary and was heading towards a flotation, the troubles at Council have put a massive hole in its accounts and debts are understood to be in the region of €12million. With the travel business expected to be under continuing pressure, it seems the banks had enough and asked for KPMG to take a look at USIT's books.
It is a sad moment for Colleary, described by many associates as a "gentleman businessman".
From Tuam, Co Galway, Colleary has been at the student travel business virtually since his late teens.
While his dapper dress sense, complete with multi-coloured dickie-bow and tinted glasses, means he cuts a rather eccentric figure in Dublin nowadays, Colleary was among a group of radical students who attended UCD in the early 1960s and most of whom went on to great things.
Colleary's involvement came through USI, the national student's union, then in its infancy. He was asked by a friend to run USI's travel bureau and after a few initial hiccups, it took off. Students suddenly found a relatively cheap way to spend the summer working in places regarded then as highly exotic and far-flung, such as London, Genoa, Rome and Paris.
When the service became more formalised in the mid-1960s, Colleary was asked to run it on a permanent basis, although always in the background was a slightly vague student idea that great profits should not accrue from such activities.
This would still be part of Colleary's make-up today, say friends.
"He has done well out of it and has become wealthy in many ways, but there would still be a bit of the student in him, even if it's only harking back to the old days now," says one associate.
Colleary has been associated with the company on and off since the 1960s.
The company has also been on and off financially, with several grim periods when it all threatened to unravel. However Colleary has shown admirable vision and drive to make USIT one of the biggest student travel firms in the world.
He did this by understanding the simple dictum if it could be done in Ireland it could be done anywhere else too.
As if USIT wasn't enough to test his patience, Colleary has since the mid-1980s been chairman of the Sunday Tribune. Not surprisingly, given its sometimes parlous finances, the job is not regarded as corporate Ireland's most coveted position.
Colleary, especially in the 1980s when the Tribune was a listed company, had to perform the ignominious task of chairing annual general meetings when he was bombarded with questions about losses at the paper and many observers wondered why he put himself through it, when he had enough on his plate at USIT.
Because of the financial strife, Colleary was forced to take unpopular decisions which sat uncomfortably with the values he carried from his old students days. "A lot of us remember him telling staff at the Dublin Tribune they would have to go. That took a lot out of him. You could see how he hated that sort of thing," remembers one person.
There was lots of good journalism during those years at the Tribune and Magill magazine. Colleary formed a strong partnership with Vincent Browne, who edited the Tribune and Magill for many of those years.
Despite the financial travails, Colleary was regarded as one of those rare, but prized creatures: the money man who is prepared to support, and indeed indulge, the more fanciful notions of journalists. Profit or no profit.
"That would be one of Gordon's limitations. He is a financial wizard in many ways. But he is also a good guy, who maybe should play hardball a bit more," says one person who has known him for many years.
JOURNALISTS speak fondly of Colleary in his role as chairman. "He was a bit like a visiting ambassador. He would arrive into the office in his dickie-bow and tell everyone they were doing a great job and leave soon after. For a businessman he was singularly lacking in ruthlessness," one reporter remembers.
"He would have made a great president. He was always nodding at people and muttering pleasantries in their ears. There was an eccentric side to him, but also something slightly old world about him," recalls another.
Other people who have worked with him echo these views. "Each year on my birthday I get a phone call to wish me well. He never misses. He is good like that."
Colleary is also noted for his personal generosity - always done quietly - and for his infectious enthusiasm. His relationship with Browne, however, soured after Browne was removed as editor by the board of Tribune newspapers. Browne, say journalists working at the paper at the time, felt let down by Colleary, whom he hoped might resign in protest at the way directors of Independent Newspapers acted during the whole episode.
"Colleary, despite mingling constantly with journalists, has always been reluctant to appear in newspapers himself. A request for an interview would always be met with, "talk to me again, it doesn't suit just right now".
To be fair Colleary's work rate is such that making time for interviews would be extremely hard. According to colleagues at USIT, he works literally day and night.
The most painful facet of the current troubles at USIT, is their timing. As recently as July 2000, Colleary was talking about the flotation of USIT. If it had gone ahead himself and his wife, Mairin, were in line to walk away with a cool £20 million, possibly more. His shares will still have to be bought out by STA, but for significantly less, one imagines. There is of course the prospect that at least the Irish arm of USIT can be salvaged and Colleary can be given a role. Those who know him say he will bounce back, but selling out to STA is likely to be deeply painful.