I would like to know what the Ryanair pilots are ordered to do by their higher ups. Been on a few of them in Europe and they all hit the runway pretty hard coming back down.
An old running joke I've heard is if the pilot has a nice smooth landing then if the pilot had a military piloting background they must be from the Air Force, hard set downs meant Navy. Navy does hard set downs because when you are landing on an aircraft carrier you only have so much runway and you have to get the hook down.
Try KLM. Drop it down from 3' up and ensure firm contact with the runway, rather than those endless landings where nobody knows if you've touched down or not. Better to avoid the ambiguity. You have to break ground effect somehow and the decisive way is the best, then at least you know you're no longer flying but rolling.
I think GP is saying that Ryanair demands that pilots use the automation to the fullest extent, and disallows "hand flying" (with an exeption, one presumes, for when the automatic systems fail, and a hope that the pilots remember how to hand fly).
But a) not Ireland b) the amount of carrier pilots is low c) The intake of new pilots in EU no longer involves a military-to-airline kind of pipeline, especially with explosion in low-cost and charter airlines
FYI: firm landings are actually correctly done, especially with rain or drizzle. It should not feel like a crash though.
The worst landing I ever had was when I landed with no sensation of touching down on the runway (a zero feet rate of descent.) Both myself and my CFI went nuts trying to figure out if we were down, or still flying along the runway and about to bounce.