DeLorean back to the present as owners meet

Leitrim man Mervyn Richardson remembers being pulled over by gardaí one day – and his relief when he found that they just wanted to sit into his car and have photographs taken.

When you drive a DeLorean, or DCM-12, you get used to that kind of attention. It's the sleek stainless steel machine, with "gull-wing doors" that open upwards, which was immortalised in Back to the Future as a time machine. Richardson says it's a head-turner and he should know; he owns two.

The DeLorean Owners of Ireland Association, who had a get-together at the weekend, in Carrigallen, Co Leitrim, might insist attention-seeking is not the point. But 32-year-old Shane Christie from Trim joked that his wife spotted the car first, and then him, when both appeared in a local newspaper.

He turned up late in Carrigallen. “I had to stop for petrol,” he explained, and the dozen or so other owners nearby nodded knowingly. Pull in anywhere and a queue forms.

It is estimated that there are 60-100 DeLoreans in Ireland, North and South, even though fewer than 9,000 were manufactured in 1981 and 1982 before John DeLorean went bust. The cars, all with left-hand drives, were made for the US market and initially were the second most popular sports car there.

Robert Lamrock, who imported his DeLorean from Kansas city in 1990, worked at UTV when the plant opened at Dunmurry outside Belfast. He met John DeLorean – “6ft 2ins and very charismatic” – a number of times.

Vintage time traveller

"I was floor manager when he appeared on Good Evening Ulster with Gloria Hunniford in 1980," said Lamrock. "We had to get one of the first cars into the studio and my job was to stop people working on other programmes from touching it".

Philip McGauran from Ballinagh, Co Cavan – one of 6,000 DeLorean owners worldwide – had his shipped from the US last January. It has been kitted in Back to the Future mode and has its own "flux capacitor", or time machine. "It cost about €20,000 but there is only 14,000 miles on it," he said.

Richardson says they do 25 miles to the gallon and are classed as “vintage” being over 30 years old, so tax and insurance are reasonable. “He has asked whether I want to drive it, but I don’t want to be the one to scratch it,” said his wife Gladys.

Her husband’s reverence for his two silver machines is hard to reconcile with the fact that, thanks to him, pigs around the country enjoy food from troughs made from DeLorean stainless steel sheets.

They were snapped up by a used-metal company when the plant closed. “I did business with that company and, as we manufacture pig-feeding systems, I bought a lot of the stainless steel and used them for the troughs,” he said.