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Who we are

This website is maintained by the Department of Health. The Department of Health fully respects your right to privacy and will not collect any personal information about you on this website without your clear and explicit permission.

Any personal information which you volunteer will be treated securely and confidentially in accordance with the Data Protection Acts 1988-2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This statement relates to our privacy practices in connection with this website. Some technical terms used in this statement are explained at the end of this page.

Collection and use of personal data

This website does not collect any personal data, apart from information that you volunteer when providing feedback or subscribing to be notified about a consultation for example. using the contact form to send us a message.
Any information you provide in this way is used only for its specified purpose. For other types of information collected relating to website visitors see below.

How long the department retains personal data collected

Personal data will only be retained by the department for the period necessary for the purposes for which data was collected and processed, or where subject to statutory requirements, for example the provisions of the of the National Archives Act, 1986.

Personal data held by the department is subject to appropriate security measures to protect the privacy of the individuals concerned and staff are aware of their data protection responsibilities.

For more information on the type of information we collect via cookies, please see our Cookie Policy page.

Information we routinely collect

We may collect the following information from each user of this site:

  • statistical information (IP address and hostname, web browser version, pages visited and so on)
  • the previous website address from which you reached us, including any search terms used
  • Your language and cookie preference settings

What we use this information for

We use this information to analyse the usage patterns of the website in order to improve the website’s effectiveness. We will neither make attempts to identify individual visitors, nor associate the technical details listed above with any individual.

It is our policy never to disclose such information in respect of individual website visitors to any third party unless explicitly stated (see Information Collecting Services section below) or obliged to disclose such information by a rule of law.

Information collecting services

We use a select number of functional services and applications on this site. These are listed below.

  1. Wordfence: The Wordfence security plugin collects digital personal data that contains IP addresses from the site visitors, but this is only used to help protect this site against malicious attacks. It stores this data for 90 days unless there is still malicious activity for that data in which case it is kept until no longer malicious.
  2. Google Analytics: We use Google Analytics to analyse the traffic and usage of our website. The statistics we send to Google are anonymised.
  3. WPML: We use WPML to translate our site’s content and manage the multi-language site. WPML stores your language preference and does not use this information for anything else, nor is it shared with third parties.
  4. Complianz. We use Complianz to manage the user’s cookie preferences and does not use this information for anything else, nor is it shared with third parties.

Embedded and linked content

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of information, stored in simple text files, placed on your computer by a website. Some cookies can be read by the website on your subsequent visits. The information stored in a cookie may relate to your browsing activities on the website, or a unique identifier so that the website can ‘remember’ you on your return visit. Other cookies are deleted when you close your browser and only relate to the working of the website.

For more information on the type of information we collect via cookies, please see our Cookie Policy page.

Further information or to make a request

Under Data Protection Law you have a number of rights afforded to you, namely:

  • You have a right to know what personal data we hold relating to you, to access this data, and ask how we are using the data;
  • You have a right to request that any inaccurate data held by us is updated accordingly;
  • You have the right to request that we transfer any data which you have provided to us to another person or entity in a commonly-used format;
  • In certain circumstances, you have the right to request that we erase personal information which is held relating to you;
  • In certain circumstances, you have the right to object to us further processing personal data which we hold in relation to you;
  • You have the right to restrict the extent to which your personal data is processed by us where you feel the data being processed is inaccurate, where the you feel the data is being used in an unlawful manner, where the data is no longer required for the purpose for which it was collected, or if you have a pending objection to our processing of the data.

If you are concerned about how personal data is processed via this website, please do not hesitate to bring such concerns to our attention. To do so, you can contact the Department of Health’s Data Protection Officer at .

Glossary of terms used

Web Browser

The piece of software you use to read web pages. Examples are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

IP Address

The identifying details for your computer (or your internet company’s computer), expressed in internet protocol code (for example 192.168.72.34). Every computer connected to the web has a unique IP address, although the address may not be the same every time a connection is made.

Cookies

Cookies are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user’s computer or other device by the user’s web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user’s device during a session.