The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) issued three afforestation licences in the first week of 2024.
According to the latest Forestry Dashboard for week one of January, those licences relate to 38ha of forestry.
The data shows that no forestry was planted in the first week of January.
The department also issued 15 tree felling licences to Coillte and 11 felling licences to private forestry owners. The combined area for felling under these licences is 307ha.
There were seven licences issued for forestry roads totalling 2km.
DAFM
Last month, DAFM published its forestry licencing plan for 2024 which estimated that the department will issue 4,200 new licences this year.
It confirmed that the department has capacity to issue sufficient licences to meet its annual target of 8,000ha of new forests.
DAFM have estimated that there will be 1,000 afforestation applications in 2024, which would be the required number of afforestation applications to be received in order to meet targets.
Last year, the department issued 88 afforestation licences, compared to over 700 during 2022.
The afforestation licences issued cover 789ha, compared to 4,972ha in 2022 and 4,246ha in 2021.
165 afforestation licence applications were made to the department in 2023, down from around 440 in 2022.
The leader of the Rural Independent Group, Mattie McGrath has said that the forestry figures for 2023 highlights “ministerial incompetence”.
“This is a stark testament to the inability of minister for agriculture Charlie McConalogue and Minister for State Pippa Hackett to uphold their commitments,” the Tipperary TD said.
“It’s a bitter irony that our agriculture ministers hold farmers to stringent emission reduction targets, yet they fall drastically short of their forestry planting targets outlined in the climate action plan,” Deputy McGrath added.