William Clay Ford Jnr. (46) has much to celebrate. One hundred years ago yesterday his great-grandfather, Henry Ford, son of a Cork family who had fled the Famine, incorporated the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn near Detroit with a capital of $28,000.
Today, under "Bill's" direction, it is worth some $163 billion, and this year its 300 millionth car will roll off the production line.
But it's not all champagne. The company, 40 per cent of whose voting rights are still controlled by 80 Ford descendants, lost some $6.4 billion in 2001 and 2002 and has seen its share value drop two-thirds in the same period. Now there is speculation that, in the face of the Japanese onslaught, one of the big-three US car manufacturers - Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler - may not survive. Ford has shed 35,000 jobs in the last two years.
Long before that, in 1984, the company had closed the Cork plant he opened in 1919 - Ford's purpose had long been achieved. In 1926 speaking of his affection for his parents' homeland, he admitted that "we chose Ireland for a plant because we wanted to start Ireland along the road to industry."
Henry Ford's lasting legacy, one that has effected every living human being for good or ill, was to unleash a social revolution by transforming the automobile from the plaything of the rich to the right of everyman. The Model T Ford, unveiled in 1908 at a price of $825, was to be, in his words, "the car for the great multitude", and, at its height, would come off the world's first automated assembly line at a rate of one every ten seconds. By 1927, when he ceased production of the small two-door - "any colour as long as it's black"- car , it was selling for $290 and had transformed rural and urban life in America and around the world .
The Model T literally reinvented the geography of people's lives, liberating farmers from their stultifying isolation, women, from the home, even teenagers, from the constraints of family life. It made commuting possible, remaking cities, and eventually drove even shops into the suburbs after the middle classes. Cheap tractors, like the Fordson produced in Cork, revolutionised agriculture. Mass tourism became possible, and new forms of mass recreation were opened up. Ford transformed the factory with his assembly lines, invented built-in obsolescence in the struggle for ever-expanding markets ... and developed a most-efficient means by which future generations would slowly poison the earth.
The liberating Mark T has been succeeded by the dread SUV, and the freedom to roam, by traffic. In the words of the song "they paved paradise, put up a parking lot."