NEARLY 50 years after Eileen Hurley last drove it, the Dunmanway woman is set to be reunited with her old car. It’s all thanks to the work of a local man, Finbarr O’Neill, who has meticulously restored the 1973 Volkswagen Beetle, claiming it’s in even better condition now than when it first left the factory.

In 1973, Eileen’s uncle Tommy, a jeweller in Dunmanway, bought the Beetle from Sean Collins’s garage in Drimoleague. He forked over the £1,450 required, the going rate for a brand-new model 1303.

It had to be that car explained Eileen, it was the only vehicle that could fit down the narrow alley beside their shop at No 45 in Dunmanway and still have clearance for Tommy to get out of the car and into the hallway.

“He got polio when he was 16 and he was paralysed from the waist down,” Eileen said, explaining that it prevented him from driving. “But he led a full life, he didn’t let it handicap him.” That’s where the second specification came in, every car they owned had to have a sunroof, so he could fish.

Eileen, who admitted she “put most of the mileage on the car”, would park up on the causeway in Rosscarbery and Tommy would cast a line, reeling his catch in through the sunroof.

“It’s a kind of an unusual story,” said Finbarr O’Neill, who bought the car from a local garage when the Hurleys parted with it when they moved to a new house in Ballinacarriga. “There wasn’t a speck of rust on the car. But when I washed it, the back two floor pans filled up with water and I couldn’t figure it out.

“So I lifted the mats and they were well rusty now, the two back floor pans. It was holding the water. Anyway, I put my hand up to the headlining and it disintegrated. The two steel drip rails on the sunroof were obsolete, and that was from bringing in the fish.”

Remarkably, that’s the only damage the car suffered in it’s 53 years. Every other nut, bolt and fixing is original, and painstakingly refurbished by Finbarr.

He had first approached Tommy directly to ask if he was interested in selling in 1978. “One Saturday, the horn blew on the car and I walked out,” he remembered. “He [Tommy] had it five years at that stage, and he wanted £1,400 off me. I said, ‘look, I told you I love the car and I want the car, but that’s too much money’. So he told Eileen, drive off.”

Two days later he got a call from his brother. “He said, ‘Tommy Hurley’s driving around in a Volvo 343.’ That was all Finbarr needed to hear. He left work and jumped in his car, coming straight down from Cork to the old garage in Derrylahane where the Beetle was waiting. The next two hours were spent bargaining, eventually bringing the price down from £1,100 to £900.

Finbarr was in his late twenties then, and spent the following half century collecting. His lifelong interest in cars, particularly Volkswagens, came from four decades working in Turner’s Cross Motors. Now in his mid 70s, he’s accumulated quite the collection, including three Beetles.

The 1949 model in his collection, he believes, is the oldest Beetle in Ireland, sporting a split back window and cable brakes. Meanwhile his 1968 convertible was used in a Volkswagen commercial just last year.

“They asked had I an old picture, and they’d come down and take it in the same place again,” he recalled. “I had a picture of it taken with my son [when] he was three years old out in Inchydoney.

“So they came down and we went out to the same place, the same car, and the same Alan. He was 37 then, and it was up in Dublin Airport for six months in Terminal 1, a big poster [saying] ‘We’ve lived a lifetime with you and loved every mile of it’.”

Now Finbarr wants to take a photograph of his own. This time with Eileen and the refurbished 1973 Beetle outside her uncle’s old shop in Dunmanway, now the Costcutters, where the car spent the first five years of its life. Work, family, and other projects delayed the restoration of Eileen’s old car but now he expects to have it ready in a matter of weeks.

“About six months ago I met her [Eileen] in the Parkway Hotel,” Finbarr said, recalling the first time he told her he still had the car. “’Oh God’, she said, ‘you haven’t’. I said, ‘I have, I still have that car’. I can imagine her face when she sees the car now, you know, 48 years on.”

He ran into her again in the Parkway recently, and she asked about the car. “I said ‘hopefully I’ll have it ready by the end of the month and I’ll get a picture of you taken outside the house’. She said, ‘let me know a couple of days [before], because I’m going to get my hair done’.”