John Lyons (Dublin North West, Labour)
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Question 168: To ask the Minister for Defence if he will provide details of all websites under his remit; the annual cost of maintaining each website; the average number of hits per month on each site for the past year; his views on whether these websites can be rationalised to bring about cost savings without compromising e-Government objectives; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [37941/11]

Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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There are five websites under my remit. The following table provides the information requested in relation to each of these websites.

1 These figures include non-human traffic from web crawlers, RSS feed hits etc.

2 www.winterready.ie was launched on the 9th November 2011. The number of hits for the first week was 22,675. Annual figures for maintenance and average number of hits will not be available until late 2012.

3 The Defence Forces' website has recently been upgraded and has replaced the old version of www.military.ie and www.rdf.ie. The upgraded website includes the Military Service Pension collection which will be launched in early 2012.

The websites managed by the Department of Defence have been optimised by co-hosting www.defence.ie and www.civildefence.ie to reduce costs and likewise www.emergencyplanning.ie and www.winterready.ie are co-hosted. Further rationalisation of these website is not feasible as each of the websites serve different purposes and have different target audiences.

The Defence Forces' new website has been optimised to ensure reduced hosting costs and more efficient administration. The website won the 2011 Realex Web Awards category for "Best Government and Council Website".