For a relatively small country the UK is home to an awful lot of credit cards, charge cards and debit cards, more than any other country in Europe although most of them are bigger in terms of land mass!

The number of credit cards in circulation in Ireland (that is Eire, the Republic of Ireland, which is not a part of the UK as Northern Ireland is) more than doubled in a single decade from just about one million in 1997 to 2.3 millions in 2007 the last year for which there are official figures.

You know that there are an awful lot of credit cards in the United States and you also probably know that many people carry a lot of debt on them.

Just how many credit cards are out there these days? Who spends the most on them?