DeLorean dies cast out
QUESTION Is it true that tooling presses used to make the body panels on the distinctive-looking DeLorean sports cars ended up submerged in the waters of Galway Bay? AFTER the DeLorean car plant in Belfast went bust in 1982, no other car manufacturers were interested in its technology, so all the machinery used to make the distinctivelooking sports cars went for scrap. Some of it was bought by a fish farm in Galway Bay for weighting its nets and keeping them tethered in place.
The story of the DeLorean sports car is extraordinary: it was started in the US by John DeLorean in 1975. He approached the Irish government in the late 1970s for funding to start production in the Republic, but Des O’Malley, who was Minister for Industry & Commerce at the time, wisely turned it down.
So DeLorean went to the British government, which fell for his story hook, line and sinker, seeing it as a great means of creating a lot of jobs in west Belfast.
The British government coughed up $120million of the $200million needed to set up the factory, at Dunmurry, on the southwest outskirts of Belfast.
It took until early 1981 before the factory was completed and the assembly line started to run.
DeLorean took on many local people, 2,500 in all.
The car was a unique design, with the body made from stainless steel and gull-shaped wings that lifted up so that the driver and passengers could get into the car.
However, the design was problematic for many home garages.
DeLorean had estimated that the break-even point for the factory was between 10,000 and 12,000 cars, but by the end of 1981, only half that number had been produced. Not only was lack of demand a big problem, but so too were major cost over-runs and unfavourable exchange rates.
The car had featured in the three films of the Back To The Future series – starring Michael J Fox as time-travelling Marty McFly – but all that publicity had made little difference to sales.
The following year, 1982, the inevitable happened: DeLorean went bankrupt, putting its 2,500 workers on the dole and wiping out all the investment in the plant, including all the money invested by the British government. By the time the factory closed down, 9,000 DeLorean cars had been built. Today, 6,500 owned by collectors are still on the road.
As for John DeLorean, after he returned to the US, he was charged with drug-trafficking following an FBI sting but was later cleared of all charges. He was declared personally bankrupt in 1999 and died in 2005, aged 80.
When the factory in Dunmurry closed down, attempts were made to sell all the production machinery to other car manufacturers, but none had any interest. This equipment included the moulds and dies used to make the panels of the car from stainless steel.
Eventually, much of this equipment was sold to a firm of scrap merchants in Cork, but soon, an innovative new use was found for the stamping dies.
At the time, PJ Carroll was one of the big cigarette makers in Ireland – with extensive manufacturing operations in Dundalk, Co. Louth. The company Carrolls closed down in 2010, but in the early 1980s, it was starting to diversify away from cigarette manufacturing. It opened a mail-order business in the US and also a fish farm on Galway Bay.
The DeLorean stamping dies were bought by this fish farm, which found them the ideal way to anchor its nets to the seabed.
The fish farm, like other PJ Carroll diversifications, didn’t last, but those DeLorean stamping dies are still there, somewhere on the seabed of Galway Bay. H. Murphy, Galway. QUESTION Does texting or using social media alter our brain chemistry? THERE is good evidence that excessive texting or computer use is stimulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine. This has been demonstrated by Dr Gary Small, Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute and director of the US university’s Memory And Ageing Research Centre.
His brain scan technology, developed to demonstrate the physical evidence of brain ageing and Alzheimer’s disease, also verified a dopamine feedback loop which, when using computer technology, led to potentially addictive behaviour.
Recent research has shown that dopamine causes seeking behaviour (desire), and it is the opioid system that makes us feel pleasure. These two systems, the ‘wanting’ (dopamine) and the ‘liking’ (opioid), are complementary. The wanting system propels you to action and the liking system makes you feel satisfied and therefore pause your seeking.
The dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system; this has an evolutionary function – seeking is more likely to keep you alive than sitting around in a placidly happy state.
However, evolution did not take the instant gratification offered by social media into account. With instant responding to texts, getting likes on Facebook for a picture, etc, it’s possible to get into a dopamine-induced loop.
In this seek-reward system, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop texting, reviewing emails or checking Facebook, etc.
You only have to watch teenagers at the dinner table to see what is going on. Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge. QUESTION What is a polliwog? FURTHER to the earlier answer that discussed the alternate use of polliwog (a tadpole) as an initiate in the Crossing the Line (the Equator) ceremony, another term for the novice was ‘griffin’.
Charles Darwin described his experience as a griffin when crossing the line on the Beagle on February 16, 1832. He noted how he was ‘placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water’. He added: ‘They then lathered my face and mouth with pitch and paint, and scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop.
‘A signal being given, I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me and ducked me. At last, glad enough, I escaped... The whole ship was a shower bath... not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.’ Beth Gayle, Portmadog, Gwynedd.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.