I should preface this by admitting that my negativity towards Ryanair had been quietly fermenting for years. Headlines, anecdotes, airport folklore and those inevitable stories involving somebody’s cousin being financially mugged by a suitcase had all done their work, until I had somehow developed a fairly substantial aversion to an airline I had never actually flown with. Oddly, that suspicion never quite extended to Michael O’Leary himself. There is something cheek-by-jowl about the man that I rather admire. He has spent decades bucking the system, irritating the establishment and demonstrating the deeply unfashionable economic principle that people quite like cheap things. So when my wife Haurchide and I decided it was time to give our kids their first experience of flying, we chose Dublin and, somewhat inevitably, Ryanair. I was apprehensive, but there comes a point when borrowed opinions need to be dragged into daylight and tested against reality. I wanted to discover whether Ryanair’s infamous reputation was deserved, exaggerated, or simply the cultural baggage accumulated by a company that has never pretended a low-cost airline ticket comes with a footman and a silver breakfast trolley.