Written answers
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport
Departmental Websites
9:00 pm
Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein)
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Question 429: To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport the number of Government websites operated by him including agencies under his Department; the cost of maintenance of these websites; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [16506/11]
Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I refer the Deputy to PQ 477 answered on Wednesday, 12th January 2011, as follows:
Details of publicly facing websites provided by my Department, approximate annual costs and averaged amount of unique site visits per month can be found in the following table.
| Website | Site Reference | Number of unique visits per month (approx) | Annual Cost (inc VAT) |
| Department of Transport | transport.ie | 11,500In December 2010 number was 133,000 | €12,200 (This figure covers the first five sites) |
| Road Haulage | roadhaulage.ie | Not available | |
| Air Accident Investigation Unit | aaiu.ie | Not available | |
| Irish Coastguard | irishcoastguard.ie | Not available | |
| Safety On the Water | safetyonthewater.ie | Not available | |
| Online motor tax | motortax.ie | 344,000 | €300,000(This figure covers four sites) |
| motarchain.ie | 650 | ||
| Change of vehicle ownership | motortrans.ie | 35,000 | |
| End of Life Vehicle | motorelv.ie | 500 | |
| Transport 21 | transport21.ie | 7,100 | €774 |
| Sustainable Transport | smartertravel.ie | 1,182 | €1,735 |
| National Bike Week | bikeweek.ie | 2,364 | €13,049 |
In 2010 the motortax.ie site processed 2 million applications and collected over €438 million. This represents almost 43% of overall motor tax receipts. The figure for unique visits per month for transport.ie refers to January to October 2010. During the severe weather in November 2010 this figure was over 62,000 and in December 2010 climbed to just over 133,000. In 2010 bikeweek.ie was upgraded to enable event organisers submit details of some 400 events directly to the site and allow management of the Bike Week Facebook page which has attracted over 1,200 followers.
Following the restructuring of Government Departments in March, the transport.ie site has been replaced by dttas.ie which includes material relating to the tourism and sports functions which are in the expanded portfolio. The transport.ie domain name will be retained for use in weather emergencies. The Transport 21 site is being retired.
Websites operated by agencies under the remit of my Department is a matter for the agencies themselves and I have referred the question to them for direct reply. I would ask the Deputy to contact my office if a reply has not been received within ten days.
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