New car sales - A record year

CAR sales, as a measure of consumer confidence, are revealing enough. They also point to the availability of credit and lenders’ enthusiasm to lend money.

By those criteria, we’re living in Boomier Ireland. New car sales rose by almost a fifth — 18% — in 2016 to top 142,000. That’s the highest new-car sales figure in almost a decade.

Add a record number of imported used cars — up 46.9% to 69,381 in 2016 compared with 47,217 in 2015 — and the picture gets boomier and boomier.