Forest road construction is an important aspect of forest management. Roads provide the means of bringing people, machines and materials into the forest to carry out essential work while also providing the means to remove harvested timber from the forest en route to the sawmill or panel board mill which use this timber as their essential raw material.

Coillte has some 8,000 km. (kilometres) of roads in its forests. About 150 km. of new roads are built each year and 150 km. are upgraded. While this road network is essential to running our business it provides a number of further benefits especially in the areas of recreation. Forest roads provide an easy means of access to the countryside. They provide safe walking routes where vehicular traffic is restricted and they also facilitate access to upland areas which otherwise would be very difficult to access.

		2006	2007	2008	2009       2010
New Roads km		149	158	117	91            141
Upgraded km		166	213	167	118          110
Total km		315	371	284	209          251