Airlines have had it. David Cameron prefers pedalling around the lanes of Cornwall to jetting off overseas. Gordon Brown drove to his Suffolk beachhut. As oil prices take off, more people are staying at home.

This week Ryanair announced an 85 per cent fall in profits. Yesterday British Airways admitted that it, too, was tipping into the red.

The Thomas Cook era, it appears, is over. Stag nights go to Bangor rather than Bucharest. Family holidays are in Devon rather than Dubrovnik. But not everyone thinks that the death knell is tolling for the airline industry.

“Rubbish,” says Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair chief executive, who is famed for his pugnacious manner, bullish optimism and showman’s approach to marketing. He has just taken three of his flights in ten hours, from Dublin to Bologna and on to Frankfurt then home again.

House prices are falling, food costs are rising but Mr O’Leary is convinced that everyone needs a holiday, particularly in a recession. “It will never go horrendously wrong when you’re offering the cheapest fares in Europe. We just have to keep flying more aircraft, opening up more routes and offering people more cheap flights.

“We are the perfect airline for the recession. You don’t want to waste any money at the moment on overpriced flights that will be delayed out of Heathrow while your bags are lost.”

He expects that Ryanair passenger numbers will grow from 51 million to 58 million this year, which, he says, is why its profits will fall as “we have guaranteed no fuel surcharges whatever oil increases there are”.

Far from retreating, he is going on the offensive with a price war. He intends to cut fares by a further 5 per cent and is opening new routes to Italy and Germany. In September Ryanair will offer a million flights for £1 each.

Many are just waiting for Mr O’Leary – the self-described “bad boy” of the airline industry – to fail. No-frills airlines have been blamed for everything from the rise in skin cancer to skinheads in Stockholm and the melting ice-caps at the North Pole.

This week President Sarkozy of France sued Ryanair for using a picture of him and his wife, Carla Bruni, without permission. “We paid €60,000 to their charity but we got more than €5 million worth of free publicity so we’re happy,” Mr O’Leary says. “I’m available to kiss and make up with Mrs Sarkozy any time she wants.”

British Airways, he says, are the real villains. “Willie Walsh [the chief executive of BA] is the one with the high fares and the fuel surcharges. BA’s neither on time nor efficient. They used to claim to be the world’s favourite airline now they’re not even Britain’s favourite airline, Ryanair is. We have twice as many passengers.”He thinks that the critics of the budget airlines are hypocrites. “People may pretend they don’t fly Ryanair but everyone does it. Tony Blair, half the Royal Family. If I showed you our passenger list, we’d have half the House of Lords, lots of MPs.

“Green protesters are our best passengers. They’re always flying off to their demonstrations. The chatterati hate mass tourism but they travel with us to their Italian villas. They all love a bargain. If they use it, why should they exclude others? It’s just snobbery.”

And he doesn’t mind the hens and stags puking in Prague. “I hate this censorious attitude to what people do. If you think they’re setting a bad example I would point you to lunatics like Robert Mugabe. He didn’t go on a stag night, he starved his entire people.”

It is, he thinks, a generational thing. “Eventually there’ll be one last British Airways flight with a bunch of old toffee-nosed snobs on it but all the kids of the toffee-nosed snobs will be flying on Ryanair.”

The budget airlines are visionaries who are creating a more equal society. “Low fares have transformed Europe politically. There’s much more movement of young people across the Continent. We’ve done more for European integration than any old fart politician in Brussels. There’ll be no going back to the old school of British Airways charging you a fortune for the privilege of going on a one-hour flight.”

Mr O’Leary is not impressed by politicians spending their holidays building sandcastles in Britain. “Typical political posturing. England’s a wonderful country but it isn’t right for every family or every holiday. Sometimes you need to get away.

“David Cameron may be holidaying in Cornwall but he flew halfway round the world just to see some huskies. Brown is only staying in Britain because he is too frightened that if he leaves someone will nick his job.”

He is not concerned that by increasing air travel he is shortening the life-cycle of polar bears and shrinking the ice-cap. “The green lobby are like those old guys in the medieval market-place, shouting about the end of the world. Climate change is not the biggest threat to mankind. If it is, why is the summer so crappy?”

Mr O’Leary seems determined to reverse the “green madness”. “Bugger bicycles – I drive a car and a tractor, I have a herd of 600 cows on my farm in Ireland who probably make a more damaging impact on the environment than my airplanes do.” He uses low-energy bulbs but only because “it’s cheaper”. The one thing he recycles is cow pats, which he uses as fertiliser. Environmental campaigners would be queueing for the dole if they were not “prattling on” about climate change.

“This global warming nonsense is no different to some of the more lunatic movements you’ve had throughout history. They were excommunicating Galileo 500 years ago for suggesting the Earth might go round the Sun. Now the nutbag ecologists say we’re boiling the planet to extinction. This is just the crazy idea for the first decade of the 21st century.”

The economic downturn will end the eco-fad. “All this climate change stuff is an inevitable byproduct of a ten-year period of economic growth and low unemployment. Now we have a recession you’ll hear an awful lot less about the bloody environment.” And politicians are manipulating people’s fears to make them pay more tax. “They call them eco-taxes but that’s just spin – it’s just taking more money off us.”

Airport taxes are “highway robbery” even though “air transport accounts for less than 2 per cent of CO2 emissions”, he says. “Marine transport accounts for 5 per cent, double the aviation industry, but you don’t hear these nutbags saying let’s tax the crap out of the ferries do you?”

Ryanair is, he insists, quite green. “We can put more passengers in our planes, we have a fleet of new aircraft that are more fuel efficient, we take less weight. Entire Brazilian rainforests of waste come off BA’s aircraft with all that extra packaging, the ancient planes, the waste of space in business class.” Nor does he think that carbon offsetting is the answer. “Where do all these offsets go? Corrupt African dictatorships and staff in New York. The money doesn’t actually go to planting trees.”

Mr O’Leary would rather “be in a lunatic asylum” than be a politician but that doesn’t stop him giving the party leaders advice. “David Cameron can hug trees because he won’t have to do much to get into power but it is not a way to run a country.”

He has even less time for Mr Brown. “It’s just Government by poll and spin-doctor. Thatcher and Blair didn’t dither they just made their decisions.”

He wants the next leader “whether it is Dave or David” to run the country in the same no-frills way as he does his business.

“We are in a recession. Governments have to take the hard decisions. Cut public spending, reduce taxation. At Ryanair we had a pay freeze, announced redundancies, cut flights from expensive airports but we’re still guaranteeing low prices and we will bounce back when oil prices settle down.”

But there will be industry casualties.

“We will soon end up with four large airlines in Europe, Ryanair will be the largest, then Lufthansa, Air France and BA. But we will be the only ones keeping the big buggers honest.”

Mr O’Leary may have made his fortune flying the masses to the Med but he prefers to spend his own summer on his farm. “I don’t like to go abroad on holiday. I’m an Irish peasant farmer – I don’t like sunshine. When I can stay at home in Ireland what the hell would I want to go away for?”

Curriculum Vitae

Job Chief executive of Ryanair since 1994

Age 47

Education Clongowes Wood College; Trinity College Dublin (did not graduate)

Career Tax consultant at KPMG, 1984-86; Dublin property developer and financial adviser to Tony Ryan; director of Ryanair, 1988-91; deputy chief executive, 1991-93; chief operating officer, 1993

Family Married to Anita Farrall, a Dublin banker, with two children

Interests Farming, racehorses, watching rugby

Highflying tastes

Rugby shirts or striped shirts? Rugby shirts

Yeats or Joyce? They’re both rubbish

Guinness or Champagne? Champagne

Riverdance or U2? U2. Riverdance is for tourists

Oysters or chips? Chips

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