THE FORD PLANT FIRST OPENED ITS DOORS IN APRIL 1917 IN THE CITY
LAST Monday marked the centenary of Ford Motors in Cork, a factory that changed the landscape of the city and county alike.
To mark the historic date, William Clay Ford Jr, the great grandson of Henry Ford, was in Cork on Monday to celebrate his family’s contribution to the country.
“Ford has deep roots in Cork, not only through my family’s historical connection, but also through the impact that the Ford factory has had as an engine for prosperity for the area over many decades,” he said.
Ford’s roots in Cork delve back further than the establishment of a factory at the Marina. Henry Ford’s father, William Ford, was born in County Cork, emigrating to America in 1847 during the height of the famine.
In the summer of 1912, Henry Ford made an important trip to re-connect with his Irish roots. Escorted most of the time by European Ford officials, Henry and his travelling party also visited France and England.
While in Ireland they spent time in Cork, Bandon, and Clonakilty and on August 8, 1912, 65 years after John and William had departed for America; the Fords arrived back in Queenstown.
This trip is thought to have inspired Henry and his wife, Clara Bryant Ford, to build a factory in his ancestral home.
In his own words, he hoped that the factory “would start Ireland along the road to industry.”
Henry Ford & Sons Ireland was incorporated in Cork on April 17th 1917 and to this day it is the only Ford operation to have borne the famous innovator’s full name.
This was the first example of foreign direct investment in Ireland, many years before the term was even coined.
By 1919 the Ford plant was up and running, their first purpose built factory outside of North America.
The factory was built despite the protests of executives within Ford who did not share Henry’s sentiment toward the country. However, despite his executives’ many objections, the factory quickly became a resounding success.
Although this was a time of rebellion in Cork, the factory only closed its doors once during the War of Independence and the Civil War.
The factory began by manufacturing the Fordson tractor, which became by far the world’s best selling tractor due to its speed, efficiency and reliability. By 1929, the Cork plant became the largest tractor factory in the world.
The factory also produced cars, including the iconic Model T, which is largely considered to be the first affordable auto mobile. Indeed, the last Model T’s ever produced rolled off the assembly line of the Cork plant in 1929.
Henry Ford was also a great contributor to Cork society. During his first visit to Ireland in 1912, Ford received a visit by a group of trustees of a hospital building project for what is now the Bon Secour Hospital.
“We’re building a hospital and thought, perhaps, in memory of your dad, you’d like to make a donation,” the men said. Ford complied and immediately wrote them a cheque for £5,000, which would be the equivalent of €500,000 in today’s money. However, things quickly went awry.
The next morning, Ford was reading the paper and was shocked to see the headline in the Cork Courier: “Henry Ford donates £50,000 to hospital.”
The trustees came to him again to thank him for his £5,000 donation and assured him there would be a front page correction in the next edition of the paper.
Ford, sensing the kind of public relations disaster that could ensue, asked what the cost of building the hospital would be. When the men told him it would be roughly £50,000, he simply added another zero.
While handing over the cheque, he said “Have this in memory of my mother and father, on one condition. Over the portal of the hospital, I want an inscription - “I came among you and you took me in.”
Many historians have speculated that the words ‘you took me in’ suggest that Ford had been conned and that he knew it.
This story is a prime example of the generosity that Ford had shown the city for many years and how important he was to the development of the whole county.
From 1917 to its closing in 1984, the Ford factory employed over 20,000 people, at some stages employing over 8% of all workers in the city.
He was also a pioneer of welfare capitalism, a philosophy he believed in that meant, in order to attract and keep the best workers, you had to offer good terms and conditions. This led to Ford workers in Cork having the most desirable jobs in the city due to its good pay and working conditions.
This generosity was paid back in spades to Ford by the Irish people over the years. Even up to the 1970s, 75% of all cars on Irish roads were Ford’s.
The downturn for the Cork factory was Ireland’s entry to the EEC in 1973, which meant that Ireland had to lift restrictions on imports of fully built vehicles into the country.
This, combined with a depression in car sales in the 1970s and 1980s, led to the closure of the plant in 1984, but the legacy will always remain.