Emergency for Ford as war halted production during the 1940's

The first half of the 1940s saw the Marina plant virtually shut down due to wartime problems. The workers there survived on scraps, while others moved to blitz-hit Dagenham to find jobs.

When Britain and France declared war on Germany in autumn, 1939, Taoiseach Eamon de Valera took to the airwaves to reaffirm Irish neutrality in the conflict ahead.

“With our history, with our experience of the last war and with a part of our country still unjustly severed from us, we felt that no other decision and no other policy was possible,” he declared.