Privacy Statement

The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is the government department responsible for housing and water, for physical and spatial planning, for local government, for weather forecasting and for built and natural heritage.

The department needs to process certain personal data in order to carry out tasks required in the course of the performance of our functions and to comply with certain legal obligations to which the department is subject.

Examples of this include processing:

• related to our role as an employer or in relation to appointments to boards
• data in order to make payments or carry out audits
• submissions from public consultations
• contact details in the course of communicating with a wide range of the department’s stakeholders
• data in the course of Oireachtas business
• FOI and AIE requests and general queries
• requests for information or complaints from customers
• in connection with our responsibility for overseeing the electoral system
• connected to public procurement and contractual agreements with service providers, etc.

Personal data may be exchanged with other government departments, local authorities, agencies under the aegis of the department, or other public bodies, in certain circumstances where this is provided for by law.

The department will only retain your personal data for as long as it is necessary for the purposes for which they were collected and subsequently processed, and in line with certain statutory requirements, where relevant. When the personal data that we collect is no longer required, we destroy or delete it in a secure manner.

The department is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy and employs appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information from unauthorised access.

The department's Data Protection Policy sets out how we will use your personal data as well as providing information regarding your rights as a data subject (including details regarding right of access, right to rectification, right to erasure, right to restriction of processing, right to object).

To access a copy of the personal data held by the department, in relation to you, please make a Subject Access Request.

You also have the right to complain to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner if you consider that your rights under GDPR have been infringed, and you have the right to seek a judicial remedy.

If you require further information, please contact the department’s Data Protection Officer, details below: