General Statement

The Northern & Western Regional Assembly fully respects your right to privacy, and we will not collect any personal information about you on this website without your clear permission. Any information which you volunteer to our website will be treated with the highest standard of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the Data Protection Acts, 1988 and 2003.

What Personal Information About Customers Does The Northern & Western Regional Assembly Gather?

The information we learn from you helps us personalise and continually improve your online experience at nwra.ie and our other websites. Here are the types of information we gather:

Information You Give Us

We receive and store any information you enter on our website or give us in any other way. You can choose not to provide certain information, but then you might not be able to take advantage of many of our features. When you register for a newsletter, we require personal information (like name, email address, etc.). We use the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing our online services for you, improving our online services, and communicating with you.

Where a user voluntarily provides personal information, the data will be used for analysis, research or customer service purposes only. Any personal data provided by you to us will be held in accordance with the data protection principles set out in the Data Protection (Amendment) Act, 2003, the Data Protection Act, 1988, Electronic Commerce Act, 2000, and other relevant EU and Irish legislation.

If we do use mailing lists to pass on information on your account(s) or promotions to you about our online services, we will always have a clear mechanism for you to remove yourself from future mailings.

The Northern & Western Regional Assembly assures you that the identity of all who contact us through this website is kept confidential: we do not rent, sell, or exchange mailing lists, or otherwise disclose such information to third parties, except as may be required by law, or through voluntary cooperation with law enforcement authorities if we judge that such cooperation is necessary to combat fraud or other crime.

Automatic Information

For general web browsing no personal information is revealed to us, although certain statistical information is available to us from our website logs. For example, like many websites, we obtain certain types of information when your web browser (browsers are pieces of software that allow you to access the internet; examples include: Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, etc.) accesses nwra.ie or our other websites.

Examples of information collected:

• Internet Protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the internet (for example 192.168.88.21)
• Login—if using our account services
• Email address—if you email any of our public email addresses
• Computer and connection information such as browser type and version, operating system, platform, referring url and pages visited

The Northern & Western Regional Assembly will make no attempt to identify individual visitors or to associate the technical details listed above with any individual, except in cases where criminal activity has taken place (i.e. in response to a “hacking” incident). It is the policy of The Northern & Western Regional Assembly never to disclose such technical information in respect of individual website visitors to a third party (except for law-enforcement bodies and then only in response to illegal activity such as “hacking”; also our Internet Service Provider which records such data on our behalf and which is bound by confidentiality provisions in this regard), unless obliged to disclose such information by a rule of law. The technical information will be used only by The Northern & Western Regional Assembly, and only for statistical and other administrative purposes. You should not that technical details, which we cannot associate with any identifiable individual, do not constitute “personal data” for the purposes of the Data Protection Acts, 1988 and 2003.

Does nwra.ie Share the Information it Receives?

Rarely. In cases where there is a statutory requirement to share information with a government agency or other local authority or where your information must be shared with another agency in order to answer a customer query, then the minimum amount of information required will be shared in an appropriate manner. Generally, information is shared with other agencies as an aggregate rather than as a specific piece of data. We may choose to release automatic information (see above) and other information received to the website to companies and organizations for fraud protection. Information of this type will only be shared about users who have caused or attempted to cause damage to nwra.ie. This type of information would be shared only as a result of “hacking” attacks, fraud or other illegal activities.

What Information Can I Access Online?

Nwra.ie will make as much public information available online as possible in order to improve the transparency of our organisation. We also publish annually details of beneficiaries of EU Funding and expenses paid to our Assembly Members.

Links To Other Websites

In order to make more information easier to find for our users, www.nwra.ie link to content owned and hosted by other local authorities, government agencies, companies, organizations, etc. We are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of other websites. Any external links to other websites are clearly identifiable as such. The Northern & Wester Regional Assembly makes no promises or recommendations about the quality of services provided by groups owning the websites we link to.

Glossary of  Technical Terms Used

• Web browser: The piece of software you use to read web pages. Examples are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator 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 alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive through your web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser and to provide security while you access your online ePayment account information.

Our Policy

In accordance with the Data Protection Acts 1988/2009/2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679, the Regional Assembly intends to ensure that any personal data given to us is:

• Processed lawfully, fairly & transparently
• Collected for specific, explicit & legitimate purposes
• Adequate, relevant & limited to what’s necessary
• Accurate & kept up to date
• Kept in a form which permits identification for no longer than is necessary
• Handled and stored in a way to ensure appropriate security

Your Rights

• To know what we do with your personal information
• To access your personal information
• To object to or restrict the usage of your personal information
• To have your personal information deleted, unless we have a reason to keep it
• To stop direct marketing messages
• To receive your personal information in a commonly-used format, or to have it passed to another data controller

We will take steps to verify your identity before granting access to your personal information. If you would like to make a Data Access Request, please contact gdoyle@nwra.ie

Contacting the Northern & Western Regional Assembly

Gerry Doyle
Assistant Director
Northern & Western Regional Assembly
The Square,
Ballaghaderreen
F45 W674

Tel: +353 949862970
Email:  gdoyle@nwra.ie
Web: www.nwra.ie

Right of Complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner

If you are not satisfied with the outcome of your response from the Northern & Western Regional Assembly, you have the right to make a complaint to the Data Protection Commission:

Data Protection Commission
Canal House, Station Road,
Portarlington, Co. Laois
R32 AP23

Low Call: 1890 252 231
Email: info@dataprotection.ie
Web: www.dataprotection.ie