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.

It also points to resurgent levels of personal debt at a time when most salaries are stationary if not stagnant.

Maybe we should remind ourselves that keeping up with the Jones always has a price.

The figures also point to a far bigger problem — how can we cut our carbon emissions if we put ever more cars on our roads?

Planning Minister Simon Coveney recently announced that work on plans to rebalance regional development was under way.

Hopefully, these plans will favour the development of a good public transport system rather than encourage unsustainable growth in private car ownership.