Almost €3.73 billion worth of transactions were made on Irish debit cards in February, according to figures from the Central Bank.
That represents a 22.8% increase on the value of debit card transactions in the same month of 2015, though it is lower than the peak of €4.49 billion recorded in December.
The majority of the transactions in February – around €2.28 billion worth - were made point-of-sale (PoS) purchases, with the remainder - €1.45 billion - being made up of ATM withdrawals.
The value of both of these categories were up significantly year-on-year, with PoS transactions rising by 29.9% and ATM withdrawals up 13.1%.
Retail represented almost half of all PoS activity in February 2016, accounting for more than €1.1 billion of transactions. That was up 3.4% year-on-year.
Meanwhile ecommerce transactions totalled €718.8m during the month – up 15.7% on February 2015.
Credit card transactions also rose during the month, albeit by a smaller margin.
There was less than €848.4m worth of transactions on credit cards in Ireland during the month, up almost 12% on February 2015.
Retail and services each represented around a quarter of these transactions, while 34% of activity was online.
Part of the reason for the increased value of debit card transactions is the fact that there were a greater number of them in use compared to a year ago.
There were almost 4.6 million debit cards in issue during February 2016, according to the Central Bank, compared to less than 4.4 million in the same month a year ago.
Credit card numbers declined year-on-year, with less than 1.89 million in issue in February compared to 1.91 million in the same month of 2015.
