WHILE IT WAS once the UK market which we tapped into in Ireland to try and save some money on our used cars, the story has very much changed.

Brexit was supposed to be a headache mostly for people bringing in second-hand hatchbacks from Liverpool and Holyhead. What nobody quite predicted was where all those cars would be replaced from. The answer, it turns out, is Japan, and the shift has been so total that it’s worth explaining properly, because I don’t think most people buying one of these cars actually understand what they’re getting or why it got here.

The scale of the change is genuinely startling.

Back in 2019, the UK supplied 95% of all the used cars imported into Ireland, more than 108,000 of them in that year alone. Japan, by comparison, was a rounding error, just under 5% of the market.

Roll forward to the first half of this year and the picture has flipped entirely. UK imports have fallen to just 14% of the total, while Japan now accounts for 55%, comfortably ahead of every other source combined.

New analysis from DoneDeal Cars, based on official SIMI registration data, shows that in the first six months of 2026 alone, 33,065 cars arrived here from Japan, against just 8,475 from Britain. Total import volumes have surged regardless, with almost 60,000 cars arriving in the opening half of this year, a pace that would beat any full year since 2020.

Cóilín Garvey, general manager of The Automatic Motor Car Centre in Lusk, has been importing from Japan since 2013, long before it was fashionable, and he watched the shift happen almost overnight.

“Brexit was probably what really kicked everything off,” he told me.

“The additional VAT on UK cars slowed down imports of non-VAT-qualifying cars. That created a huge opening for Japanese cars to come in.”

Cóilín Garvey, general manager of The Automatic Motor Car Centre in Lusk

Before that, he said, Irish importers from Japan were mostly bringing in older, slightly oddball models, the Aquas and Vitzes........

© TheJournal