IN THE SUMMER of 1990, on the day of our school Sports Day, my father Pat — motoring correspondent with the Sunday Independent — collected me in a Mazda MX-5. It was one of the first in Ireland. I had never seen anything like it. Low, sleek, roof down, completely unlike anything else in the car park. I understood immediately why it existed.

I have never owned a convertible. But I have driven dozens of them since, and something happens when you do that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t. You become suddenly, almost uncomfortably aware of the road, the speed, the smell of the air, the hedgerows coming at you.

It is more visceral than driving a normal car. More present. The world feels immediate in a way it doesn’t through glass and steel. But of course we live in Ireland, so people look at you because you have ‘Notions’. 

Everyone should experience that at least once. The problem is that experiencing it and owning one are entirely different things. And Ireland is full of people who confused the two. And I tip my hat to them.

The numbers tell the story

In 2025, 125 new convertibles were registered in Ireland. That is roughly one every three days. A niche purchase, certainly, convertibles accounted for just 0.1% of the new car market, ranking tenth out of all body types. But here is what is striking: that figure has barely moved in a decade.

In 2015, 133 new convertibles were registered. While saloons collapsed by 61% over the same period and estates by nearly the same, the convertible just held on. In a decade that transformed the Irish car market — SUVs everywhere, traditional body types in freefall the convertible proved oddly immune to rational market forces.

That immunity has a simple explanation. Nobody buys a convertible for rational reasons.

Consider the timing of those 125 registrations. The single busiest month for new convertible sales in 2025 was January – 32 cars, more than any other month. January. The darkest, coldest, most horizontally raining month in the Irish calendar. These were not people responding to sunshine. These were people responding to hope. They sat across a desk from a dealer in the first bleak weeks of the year and decided, with full sincerity, that this would be the summer. Sure January is always the busiest month for new car sales, but even still, you have to admire these people’s optimism. 

Supply and demand

Today, there are 399 convertibles listed for sale on DoneDeal Cars — 228 through dealerships and 171 privately. Against 125 new registrations in all of 2025, that is a used supply more than three times the annual new market. A lot of those cars represent completed optimism cycles: bought with ambition, used occasionally, quietly listed again before the next winter arrives.

According to figures from DoneDeal Cars, the share of convertible searches increases by around 60% between January and April every year. It is a pattern that repeats with remarkable consistency. Every spring, without fail, the searches surge. Irish people do not browse for convertibles in a considered, year-round way. They browse for convertibles the moment the temperature clears 15 degrees.

This is a well-documented psychological phenomenon called optimism bias, which is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive future events and underestimate obstacles.

Behavioural economists call the related impulse affective forecasting: predicting how you will feel in a future state. We are reliably bad at it. The convertible is a near-perfect case study. The emotional peak is the imagined drive, not the actual one. By the time the car is on your driveway and it is raining sideways in Athlone, the affective forecast has already been filed and forgotten.

The object and the feeling

The Mazda MX-5 has been on sale in Ireland since 1990. It has sold over 1.2 million worldwide. It is still petrol. Still manual. Still essentially the same car in essence, as it was when my father pulled up in that car park 36 years ago. In an industry that reinvents itself every five minutes, the MX-5 never felt the need. It understood from the beginning what it was for, and it never pretended to be anything else. That is rarer than it sounds.

The convertible has survived every rational assault on its existence: Irish weather, rising SUV dominance, the relentless march of practicality — because it was never really a car in the functional sense. It is a mood. A seasonal object, like a barbecue or a paddling pool, that spends most of its life waiting for conditions that may or may not arrive.

What Irish convertible buyers are really purchasing is not a car. It is the memory of a drive they once took, or a drive they have imagined taking, on a road that exists somewhere between West Cork and their best version of themselves. The ownership is an attempt to possess an experience. And experiences, as it turns out, cannot be owned. They can only be encountered. The people who figure that out end up on DoneDeal in October selling it on again. 

This weekend, with the sun on the road and the radio on, the ones who haven’t yet will be entirely right to enjoy it. Buying a convertible in Ireland is not a delusion. It is a declaration. A bet on summer, placed in full knowledge of the odds.

That takes a particular kind of courage. The MX-5 has been proving it for 36 years.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.

Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd