Ryanair has confirmed that one its staff abused a blogger who questionned the airline site's credentials.

But far from apologising for the volley of abuse, Ryanair today dismissed bloggers as "lunatics" and "idiots."

The extraordinary exchanges came after Dublin-based web designer Jason Roe posted on his site:

"As I was booking flights to Cork, I noticed something a bit strange. When I went to change my flight times, all of the prices on the flights had changed to “Total Cost of Flight 0.00”.

Roe said he worked out what had happened - in trying to avoid credit card charges, he jumped into the Ryanair voucher section - in which there are no charges on vouchers. "So it can be a good way to avoid charges," he added.

Other bloggers quickly pointed out that despite the apparent glitch, the Ryanair site did not allow users to complete a £0.00 transaction, with bloggers finding an 'error' message occuring, or being sent back to a search page.

But then six hours after Jason's posting, a blogger called Ryanair Staff wellied in:

"You’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is! you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!"

Roe defended his posting, saying: " I have not lied, I found a bug in your site that allows a user to see a 0.00 price listed beside a flight." And he later clarified that he did not claim to have completed the booking process.

But that didn't stop Ryanair Staff continuing a vitriolic attack on Roe: "If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things.

And Ryanair Staff continued: "Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this. If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have."

Other users of the blog rallied to defend Roe. Lar Veale said: "Woohoo - the race to the bottom has been won! No frills culture applies to manners, customer service and common decency."

And Aedan said: "I am amazed at the rudeness and aggression of ryanair staffers. Why can’t they accept the bug report and fix it."

The row has to date generated 85 comments and was picked up by online travel publication Travolution where another 11 comments were added.

And today Ryanair confirmed to Times Online that it was a staff member responsible for the posts - but in typical Ryanair bullish fashion, a spokesman refused to apologise:

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

"Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.

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