Ryanair would not let Liverpool fan (13) with no arms or legs take power wheelchair on flight
Ryanair
has been accused of mistreating a teenage boy with no arms or legs last weekend by refusing to allow him to bring his power wheelchair on a flight.
The boy was travelling from Dublin to Liverpool where he was due to watch
Liverpool
football team
lift the premiership trophy.
However, the airline dismissed the accusations as emotive, inaccurate and absurd, saying that it stood over its rules governing wheelchair passengers.
Dáire Gorman (13) was born with Crommelin syndrome, an extremely rare condition, and has lived without arms or femur bones in his legs.
READ MORE
Last year, a video of him becoming overwhelmed with the emotion at his first Liverpool game went viral and saw him invited back to Anfield to meet the team's then manager Jurgen Klopp.
On his most recent trip, Ryanair 'completely took Daire's independence away and made him feel like an inconvenience because he used a power wheelchair', his mother Shelley said.
Dáire Gorman with then Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp. Photograph: Liverpool FC YouTube
She booked the trip for her son and husband in February and included special assistance, supplying details of the wheelchair. However, days before the trip Ryanair emailed her asking for the wheelchair dimensions when folded.
'I replied saying it was a power wheelchair and couldn't fold down,' she said.
She was told it wasn't possible to take the powerchair as it was too big.
'I ended up ringing special assistance customer services and they asked could he not go without the chair, and refused to take his chair,' she said.
She described this as 'extremely upsetting'.
'As a parent, you try and do your best for your children and especially children with additional needs and protect them from negativity – my child needs his wheelchair, imagine asking can he not go without it,' she said.
She said in her initial interactions
Ryanair
refused a refund, although one was subsequently offered.
It was not needed as her son's occupational therapist sourced a manual wheelchair for temporary use, but there were further difficulties.
She said her son had to use an 'aisle chair' to transfer on to the plane seat, but on the flight he was left until the plane was full, resulting in him being pushed the full length of the plane, 'knocking off people' and 'losing his dignity [with] everyone watching him transfer on to the seat'.
Ryanair
'completely took Daire's independence away and made him feel like an inconvenience', she said.
In response,
Ryanair
said 'regrettably, these emotive claims made by his mother are false. She fails anywhere in her complaint to accept that this wheelchair exceeded our well-publicised max dimensions.'
A spokeswoman said this information was 'readily available to Ms Gorman when this booking was made and if she had simply complied with them then that would have been the end of the matter'.
Ryanair denied she was told her son could consider travelling without a wheelchair and said it had offered her a refund.
The spokeswoman added that wheelchair boarding is not handled by Ryanair, but rather by the wheelchair service operated by airport operator, DAA.
The statement said Ms Gorman's 'claim that 'Ryanair completely took Daire's independence away' is false and absurd'.
The statement concluded with a recommendation that Ms Gorman 'should either comply with our max wheelchair dimensions, or do not make a booking on Ryanair'.
Ryanair did not respond to follow-up queries noting that a key part of Ms Gorman's complaint was the position of her son's seat at the back of the plane.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Irish economy grew by 22% over the past year. Yes, you read that right
Ireland's economic data was always going to be a bit special at the start of this year. But Thursday's figures were mind-bending. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which we now stand out in international comparisons. And this is not just a curiosity – it matters. The economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) , was 22 per cent larger in the first quarter of 2025 than one year earlier, according to the latest estimates from the Central Statistics Office . Think about it. The figures suggest that for every €1 of activity last year, there was €1.22 in 2025. Even comparing GDP in the first quarter of this year with the last quarter of 2024, there is a rise of close to 10 per cent – this is roughly the extent of growth across the euro zone over the past decade. Of course this bonkers data is not real, in the sense that it does not reflect what is happening in the underlying economy in which we all live. How could it? As has been long discussed the headline economic data is entirely distorted by the activities and tax planning of a small number of very big US tech and pharma companies. From time to time, this has created huge distortions in the figures. A decade ago, top US economist Paul Krugman famously described a 26 per cent GDP growth rate reported for the Irish economy (later revised up to over 30 per cent) as 'leprechaun' economics . At the time the figures were distorted by massive tax-driven investments by the companies concerned, including Apple, essentially a manoeuvre by the companies involved to try to keep their tax bills down as international rules changed. READ MORE Now, as one observer put it, we are seeing another 'Krugman' moment. This time the reasons are different. Big pharma companies have been rushing product over to the US to try to get drugs and key ingredients into the market before Donald Trump announces tariffs on the sector. This has led to a surge in exports, feeding into the GDP data. Many of these are manufactured here – and some are made elsewhere but organised by Irish subsidiaries and so also show up in our figures. And so we see a massive surge in Irish GDP in the first quarter of this year. A big – temporary – decline in pharma exports in GDP will follow at some stage, as the firms involved must now have massive stocks jammed into every free warehouse in the US. Much will depend on how the tariffs story plays out. [ Welcome (back) to the era of Leprechaun economics Opens in new window ] Whether Krugman renews his leprechaun offensive or not, let's not pretend this won't be noticed. Ireland's GDP data is not some irrelevance in a quirky economic corner. The amounts of money being moved through Ireland are now enormous. Daniel Kral, chief economist at Oxford Economics , calculates that Ireland – which accounts for 4 per cent of the euro zone economy – accounted for half its total growth over the past year. Analysts have taken to looking at the figures 'excluding Ireland'. How do we pull back from all of this to judge the underlying health of the economy? Total demand in the domestic economy – adjusted by the CSO to remove the multinational factors - rose just 1 per cent over the year. But we need to look under the surface here, too. Consumer spending, a good measure of how we feel, was up by a decent 2.5 per cent. But the overall figure was dragged down by a fall in business investment, presumably reflecting the international uncertainty. So households continued to spend in the first part of the year, but businesses are taking a wait-and-see approach to big capital spending. This is likely to be reflected in the jobs market as the year goes on – and here AI is also changing the game in many sectors. Consumers may get more cautious too. Uncertainty is starting to slow the economy and this is a trend we need to watch as the year goes on. The piece of data that seemed a bit out of line this week was a 30 per cent fall in corporation tax in May compared with the same month last year. This was affected by the comparison with a strong May last year – which the Department of Finance suggests was boosted by once-off factors. Two of our biggest taxpayers, Pfizer and Microsoft – pay significant amounts of tax that month. But the key early indicator for most of the big companies is June – and what happens here will give a good pointer for the year as a whole. The figures do underline one point. It is our huge reliance on the opaque affairs of four or five massive companies – and our exposure to the sectors they operate in, their own performance and complex decisions on how their tax structures are set up. Our latest bout of data exceptionalism again puts Ireland in the spotlight, when it would have been better to keep the head down. It underlines the outsize take Ireland is getting from pharma and tech activity in the EU – both contentious points in the White House. Notably, the US added Ireland to an economic watch list this week, based on the size of our trade surplus. We are very much on the radar in Washington. Our corporate tax take and manufacturing base are looked on enviously not only from the US , but from elsewhere in Europe. [ 'No long-term commitments to anything' – Ireland's economy is experiencing a silent slowdown Opens in new window ] The advance shipping of products again focuses attention on the scale of activity and tax planning in Ireland by big pharma companies. And this causes a rollercoaster of cyclical activity. But what really counts is longer-term, structural issues. Will these pharma giants decide over time – and it would take years – to relocate some of their production to the US? Will their profits and thus tax payments here be hit by Trump's policies? Or will they – or some of the tech giants – alter their corporate structures so that they pay significantly less tax here? It comes down to whether Trump's policies change the way the economic and corporate world operates fundamentally, a fair bit or not much at all. As Ireland benefits from the current system so much, the more it changes, the more risks there are for us. The coming months will tell a lot.
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Ireland's plan to weaken legal protections for waterways will push many of them beyond recovery
If I went to my doctor with a cancerous tumour that was treatable and curable, and he shrugged it off and told me to accept it – knowing that without treatment, it would eventually kill me – I'd think he had lost his mind. Yet this is how the Irish State plans to treat some of our most treasured rivers, lakes and estuaries. According to a proposal from the Department of Housing , certain iconic stretches of waters on the likes of the Shannon, Boyne and Blackwater rivers will no longer be viewed as needing restoration. Instead, they will face a future as engineered channels. In the 1980s and '90s, Europeans began to recognise that their rivers were in severe decline due to decades of neglect. Naturally meandering waterways were straightened, drained and dammed; chemicals, pesticides and untreated sewage poured into them unchecked. The problem was cross-border: the Danube, which flows through 10 countries, became saturated with pollution. In 1986, a fire at a chemical warehouse near Basle, Switzerland, caused the Rhine river to turn red with mercury and dyes, as vast amounts of toxic waste flowed hundreds of kilometres downstream into Germany and the Netherlands. Drinking water supplies were shut off, and aquatic life, such as European eels, was decimated. What was clear was that Europe needed a unified, legally binding approach to water protection that set out common rules, clear responsibilities and shared goals. By 2000, a plan was in place that aimed to safeguard waterways not only for aquatic life but also as a source of drinking water, transport and leisure for humans. This law, known as the Water Framework Directive, has a clear objective: to ensure all waterbodies reach at least 'good status', meaning they are clean, healthy and safe for swimming and drinking. Built into the plan is a legal recognition that some waterbodies, especially in highly industrialised countries such as Germany, have been altered so extensively that returning them to their natural state would be impossible or potentially harmful to human interests and security. These are placed in a special category, called 'heavily modified water bodies', and are legally exempt from the requirement to achieve 'good' status. They include reservoirs supplying drinking water, canals designed for navigation or drainage, urban rivers confined within concrete channels or culverts, ports, harbours and rivers drained for agricultural use. READ MORE While they cannot be used as dumping grounds for pollutants, the law accepts that these waters will never be restored or naturalised. For that reason, the principle guiding 'heavily modified' designation should be balanced and factor in whether it serves the widest possible interest: their number should be kept to a minimum, and where ongoing engineering and management is necessary – for example, in a reservoir or port – they must deliver significant benefit to the public. Ireland has 33 heavily modified water bodies, including Poulaphouca reservoir, which provides drinking water to Dublin; Cork Harbour for industrial activity; and New Ross Port in Wexford, run by the council as a transport route. But under the department's proposal, released in March, this number will increase by 1,312 per cent. It includes 122 waterbodies that run through some of Ireland's unique natural areas. It includes stretches of the Nore, Brosna, Maigue, Liffey, Fergus, Mulkear and Carrowbeg rivers; lakes such as Lough Corrib and Lough Derg; and estuaries like Lower Suir. [ Pollution on the Liffey: Algal blooms at Blessington a threat to Dublin's drinking water Opens in new window ] Why does the State want to all but give up on these waters? The problem stems from a law dating back to 1945, the Arterial Drainage Act, which gives the State sweeping powers to carry out large-scale drainage works, such as deepening, widening, dredging and straightening. Eighty years ago – when we knew nothing about climate warming – the law was viewed as progressive; today it clashes with the Water Framework Directive because this extent of drainage causes severe damage, irreversibly stripping rivers of their natural life and course. Ireland cannot abide by one law with the other. As long as these waters are drained, they will never meet the standards set by EU water law. Reservoirs, ports, canals and harbours must be operational, and as such, designating them as 'heavily modified' is in the public interest, as their functional demands cannot be fulfilled while simultaneously attempting restoration. But in the future, who'll benefit from the continual dredging of the Clare river in Galway, once one of our most natural rivers and now, in many parts, a canalised channel? Or the river Brosna, whose waters followed a meandering course through Offaly before its curves were straightened and its channel deepened? And how is it justified in the public interest, given that drainage makes our towns and cities more – not less – vulnerable to flash flooding? Instead of reshaping drainage policy so that it's fit for the critical challenges we face – not least, the chaotic mix of water shortages and drought, extreme weather events and rapidly warming waters – what's proposed is simply remove these waters from any hope of being restored to full health. Never before have our waterways needed climate and nature-proofed policies more. Our waters are warming at levels never seen before – for example, in Lough Feeagh in Mayo, the heat in the water has been above the long-term average (recorded since 1960) since January. Sea temperatures have soared. This is the future for which we need to rapidly prepare. Under the Nature Restoration Law, we're required to restore at least 20 per cent of our land and sea areas by 2030, increasing to 90 per cent by 2050. That includes rewetting organic soils, like those at the headwaters of the river Boyne, which are currently drained. Instead of giving up on our waters and relegating them to a lower standard – all for the sake of an outdated, 80-year-old law – now is the time to put energy into nature-based solutions, which are proven to be effective and cheap as a way to reduce flood risk, improve soil health and meet climate, nature and water goals without abandoning the land. We can't ignore the facts: our waterways are facing immense pressure, and some are already critically ill. Even if our only concern was water security, the urgent need for restoration is clear. This proposal to weaken their legal protections will only speed up their deterioration. Across Ireland, communities are volunteering to revive the life in their local waters. If this legal loophole is allowed, their efforts will be in vain. In effect, the State would be like a doctor unfit to practice – turning its back on the patient instead of providing care. As a result, many of our most treasured rivers and lakes will, without question, slip beyond recovery.
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
HSE was aware of report on allegations of toxic culture and waiting list irregularities, CHI tells Minister
The Health Service Executive was made aware of a controversial report containing allegations about a toxic work culture and potential irregularities in the operation of schemes to tackle waiting lists, Children's Health Ireland (CHI) has told the Minister for Health . The Irish Times understands CHI, which runs children's hospitals in Dublin, said the contents of an internal report on issues in one of its hospitals had been 'discussed' with a senior HSE executive. CHI maintained in correspondence with Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill that the report had been raised as part of performance review meetings. The assertion was made last week as part of a submission to the Minister, who had asked questions about the background to the internal report. CHI did not reply to a series of questions submitted by The Irish Times about the internal report. READ MORE The report was drawn up by Children's Health Ireland in late 2021 and early 2022 but never published. The document caused consternation in Government after parts were first revealed by the Sunday Times a fortnight ago. HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster , who took up office in 2023, said he had never been told about the document. He described the allegations in the CHI report as 'absolutely shocking'. The HSE this week referred the report to gardaí. The report raised questions over whether a series of clinics run by a consultant at CHI on Saturdays for patients on waiting lists were necessary. It said the consultant had been paid an additional €35,800 under the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), which buys care for patients on long public waiting lists. [ CHI consultant at centre of review did not fulfil on-call hours for three years due to 'health issues' Opens in new window ] The Irish Times reported this week that the CHI document maintained that there were 'significant concerns relating to the prudent and beneficial management of NTPF funding and lack of oversight of access initiatives which are ultimately not in keeping with the memorandum of understanding between CHI and the NTPF'. The report also said Children's Health Ireland had a 'broken culture – created by dysfunctional relationships and challenging behaviours'. The National Treatment Purchase Fund said that on learning of the allegations a fortnight ago, it suspended, pending a review, arrangements at CHI – known as insourcing – that saw hospitals and staff receive additional payments for treating patients on waiting lists outside core working hours. The Department of Health said on Friday that it believed NTPF funding for waiting list initiatives at Children's Health Ireland would recommence imminently. The NTPF said it took the issues around insourcing raised by the Children's Health Ireland report very seriously and was working closely with the department and HSE on this matter. 'It is completely unacceptable that there would be any misuse of public money and that children would wait longer for surgery when the whole purpose of the National Treatment Purchase Fund is to ensure faster access to treatment for public patients. The NTPF will fully reserve its position in relation to any proven misuse of public money and explore all options for restitution while ensuring public patients get the treatment they deserve.' It said that following initial reports about the CHI internal report, it immediately placed a temporary pause on all insourcing work with the children's hospital group 'while it initiated a review of this work to gather the necessary assurances regarding compliance, value for money and appropriate use of funding mechanisms'. 'This work is ongoing at the highest level with CHI to obtain and review these assurances. The intention is that the temporary pause will be lifted as soon as the NTPF is satisfied with the assurances given by CHI in this review so as to minimise any disruption to children and their families.' It said media reports that claimed 'thousands' of children would face surgery delays due to this pause were inaccurate, ill-informed and very disappointing to read.
