“I started on the wet sanding, when the car’s undercoat would be done. It would come down the line, and I’d be there with a bucket of water and some emery paper.”
Paddy Foley leans back in the office chair he’s been loaned for our chat, and then says something that would sound almost extraordinary to a modern car factory employee. “I moved around the plant a bit, worked on the trim line for a while, then I started fitting the dashboard dials and clocks.
“But that was at the time when we were told that we’d be moving the factory, from what we call now the old place to the new place. And that was going to come with a big change, because we were going to move from making 14 cars a day to making 37 cars a day.”
Foley is reminiscing about his time working in the Renault factory in Wexford town, which operated from 1965 until 1986. As with all Irish car factories at the time, it wasn’t making cars from scratch.
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Instead, cars were shipped in kit form, in this case from factories in France, to be assembled locally, with a certain amount of local materials used – tyres, glass, cloth trim etc – to swerve around swingeing Irish import taxes applied to cars.
Moving from 14 cars a day to 37 cars a day, though?
“The guys at the time were saying, ‘Jeez, how are we going to do 37 cars a day when we’ve been used to doing 14?’” Foley elaborates.
“But, you know, it was doable, especially when we moved to a conveyor system, which wasn’t a conveyor belt as such, but more of a manual conveyor, with the cars moving around the factory on a trolley.
“You’d have 12 minutes to do each job, but you’d get better at it and maybe on Friday evening you’d do a few extra bits and pieces so you could ease into it again on a Monday morning.”
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Assembling cars was often dull, repetitive work – it still is, albeit now in a modern car factory it’s usually more about minding the robots – but Foley tells me that there were ways to find some fun.
“We used to get to drive some of the cars, especially if some dealer in Dublin, say, needed a couple of extra cars delivered quickly, so instead of loading them on to a truck we’d drive them up. The trick was to try and get a Renault 16 for the drive back, because that was the biggest car, and the quickest.”
More on the Renault 16 in a moment, but it might come as a surprise that what was Renault’s most sophisticated car of the time was actually built in Wexford.
The factory is better known for building the far simpler, more affordable Renault 4, mostly in yellow; although, as Foley tells me, it’s a myth that they were all painted that colour.
“We definitely did a batch of 500 Renault 4s that were yellow. By the end of that, you could only see in yellow,” says Foley, but he’s adamant that they were also painted in white (the hardest colour to get right, he says), and light blue, as well as the famous white and orange for the Post & Telegraph (P&T) service, the State-run forebear of Eir.
According to figures dug up for The Irish Times by motoring historian Andrew Ryan, 23,400 Renault 4s were made for the Irish market in the 31 years that the Wexford factory was operating.
There was also a handful of higher-specification Renault 5 GTL models built, around 1,300, plus – perhaps surprisingly – a batch of 9,000 made for export to the UK in 1972, and another batch of 4,800 Renault 4s destined for Italy.
However, it’s wrong to say that the plant only assembled the famous 4. The Renault 6 was also assembled there, with about 2,800 of the boxy hatchbacks made in Wexford.
So too was the rear-engined Renault 8 (1,600 of those), the Renault 10 (also rear-engined, looks like a Soviet-era car; 2,900 of those were made in Wexford), and the pointy-ended Renault 12 (1,100 of those).
However, the star of our story – aside of course, from Foley himself – is the Renault 16. Surprisingly, more than 2,600 of those were made in Wexford between 1965 and 1980, when the model was replaced by the bigger, pricier Renault 20.
Why is it surprising that the 16 was made in Ireland? Looking at the pristine one which we’ve been invited to drive, parked outside Menapia Motors in Wexford (and many thanks to them for letting us play with their favourite toy, which is actually for sale), most would just assume that it’s an entirely conventional five-door hatchback.
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Which is right – that’s precisely what it is, and precisely what none of its competitors were in 1965. It’s hard to see it now, with hindsight getting in the way, but the Renault 16 must have seemed like a spaceship in ’65 compared to the other cars you’d be buying for the same money.
The Ford Cortina and Peugeot 404 were both resolutely stolid, upright, three-box saloons with iron-block engines and rear-wheel drive. The Austin 1800, launched just before the Renault 16, was at least front-wheel drive, but it lacked a hatch (and was also famously poorly built).
The Renault 16, though? It used an all-aluminium engine, with the gearbox mounted in front of it, just behind the sparkling chrome grille. The hatchback rear opens up to reveal a useful 343-litre boot (small by today’s standards, generous then) which can be, almost uniquely at the time, expanded out by folding down the back seats.
Then there’s the suspension. When most family cars of the time were still using live axles and leaf springs (closer to a horse cart than a modern car) the 16 used wishbones and torsion bars up front, and independent unequal torsion bars at the rear. This grants the 16 a smooth, floaty ride comfort entirely alien to any modern car this side of a Rolls-Royce.
Going slowly so as to allow time to master the four-speed column-change gearbox, the 16 feels glassy and airy, with a staggering view out compared to enclosed, thick-pillared modern cars.
The electric Renault Scenic in which we’ve driven down to meet the 16 is hardly the worst offender in this category, but compared to the 16 it’s like driving a tank with the hatches shut.
Gearbox mastered (well, mostly), we pick up speed and find that the 16 feels almost impossibly modern. You’re perched on seats so comfortable that with the two armchairs up front, and the big sofa behind, it’s like occupying a three-piece suite flying low, in close formation.
Brilliant though the seats are, they’re nothing compared to the suspension, which takes lumpy, unironed Irish roads and smooths them out. It is almost alarming to note that there is no mainstream modern car that rides as comfortably as this 1968 Renault 16.
And it’s not as if the 16 is sluggishly plodding along, holding up other traffic. Instead, it easily lopes along at 100km/h on a main road, and, this being a 1.6-litre TS model, with 84hp, it was capable of a genuine 160km/h in period, at a time when many other cars on the road would have struggled to see 120km/h, even if that had been legal at the time.
Sure, it rolls copiously in corners, and the lack of a fifth gear (a delicacy reserved for the range-topping TX model) means that the engine gets a bit noisy when cruising, but honestly, this sexagenarian French saloon could teach more than a few modern cars about comfort, refinement and easy-going handling.
Actually, driving home in the Scenic shows that there is some kinship. The modern electric SUV fidgets more (much more) over poor surfaces, but it’s overall very smooth, hugely spacious, practical and classy without trying to be obnoxiously posh.
That’s very much the space that the 16 carved out for itself.
Philosopher Roland Barthes compared the original 1955 Citroën DS to the great cathedrals of France, which surely means that the 16 – pretty much the equal of the DS in comfort terms, without the wallet-sucking complication – deserves at least the status of an architecturally interesting nunnery.
Whatever about the 16’s individual brilliance, or how it relates to modern cars, there’s an inevitable nostalgia for a time when we made things ourselves, rather than paying others to make them for us.
As Paddy Foley tells me: “I reckon 90 per cent of the people who worked in Renault’s in Wexford thought it was a great place to work, and the money was good too. And the quality of the cars we made was, I think, better than the ones coming from France.
“Sure you knew some of the people who were going to buy them.”
