Despite the country having fewer ATMs than most European countries, Irish people averaged 46 ATM cash withdrawals in 2004, about twice the average European frequency, as banks' efforts to move customers away from bank branches appeared to bear fruit.

Both the number of ATMs and of cash cards and ATM cards showed strong rises.

Cash cards rose by around a quarter of a million to 4.1 million in 2004, while ATM numbers increased by 654, reflecting a growing trend to install ATMs in convenience stores. The number of pointof-sale terminals remained static at 50,000 for the third year in a row.

But despite Ireland's love affair with plastic, growth in credit card penetration decreased dramatically in 2004, according to the ECB statistics. The number of credit cards in the country passed the two million mark in 2004, but their numbers grew by just 9,000 in that year compared to 123,000 in the previous year as the increase in the government tax on credit cards hit home.

Much of the slowdown can be explained by people returning inactive cards to their issuers to avoid paying the government duty which increased that year. The slowdown appeared to have little impact on credit card spending, as the value of credit card transactions in the year jumped by 1bn to 9.35bn Debit cards were the real winners, with circulation increasing in the same year by 284,000 to reach 1.29 million. Card numbers of all types rose by nearly half a million to 7.4 million, suggesting that the push to persuade people to switch to plastic is continuing to gather pace.

Una Dillon, head of card services at the Irish Payment Services Organisation (IPSO), expressed satisfaction with the trends in increased card usage. "The increased usage of credit, debit and ATM cards means that there is a reduced volume of cash and paper in circulation and thus processing costs are reduced across the payments industry for all parties involved in payments."

But Dillon said Ireland still lags behind its peers despite the advances made in recent years. "When it comes to Ireland's payment behaviour, it is still largely all paper . . .

cheques and cash . . . and that costs the Irish economy in excess of 500m every year."