I propose to take Questions Nos. 1119, 1120, 1121, 1122 and 1131 together.
The Department makes available a selection of forestry statistics on the Department’s pages of the Government of Ireland website, gov.ie. A Forestry Dashboard is circulated weekly and provides details of outputs for that week, month, and year to date.
Data on afforestation, forest roads and felling licences broken down by county is being prepared and will be forwarded to the Deputy.
Note: Quality data is only available from 26th April 2016 for afforestation and forest road applications and from 24th May 2017 for private tree felling licences, unless otherwise indicated below.
To 23rd April, the number of licences issued this year issued is 1,012. I expect this output to continue to increase over the coming quarters, to achieve the target of 4,500 licences for the year.
Scheme
|
Licences
|
Area (ha)/
Length (m)
|
Volume
(m3)
|
Felling
|
600
|
6,429.53
|
1,897,711.50
|
Afforestation
|
203
|
1,788.96
|
|
Roads
|
209
|
89,448
|
|
Total licences
|
1,012
|
|
|
The Department publishes monthly reports of licensing and other outputs on the Department’s website and those reports are available from 2016. Therefore, the average monthly output of forestry licences in each of the years from 2016 to date is provided below.
The total number of licences issued per month is indicated in the table below for the years 2016 to end March, 2021
totallicences
Average number of licences issued per month for the year indicated.
2016
|
236
|
2017
|
131
|
2018
|
137
|
2019
|
148
|
2020
|
72
|
2021
|
95
|
Average time in months from date advertised to date of decision is indicated below.
*averagetime
The amount of new forestry planted by county, from 2015 to 2020 in hectares is below.
newforesrty