Background
Cookie legislation was introduced in the revision of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, 2003, updated 2011. The forthcoming ePrivacy Directive may make changes to the rules on cookies which will be included in a later update of this Cookie Policy.
Why do we use Cookies?
Our use of cookies is to primarily help enhance your user experience and to improve the efficiency of our website. We use certain cookies to remember you when you visit the website, to keep track of browsing patterns and to understand how visitors use the website site.
What are Cookies?
Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. There are different types of cookies: some are essential for the site to operate properly, whereas others are aimed at enhancing and personalising your user experience. Cookies can help us to understand how consumers are interacting with our website, which helps us to improve our site and deliver a better service to you.
What Cookies do we use?
Strictly necessary Cookies
Generally, these cookies will be essential first-party session cookies. Not all first-party session cookies will fall into the strictly necessary category for the purposes of the Cookie legislation. Strictly necessary cookies will generally be used to store a unique identifier to manage and identify the user as unique to other users currently viewing the website, in order to provide a consistent and accurate service to the user.
Essential Cookies
These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as signing-up to receive emails from us.
Performance Cookies
These cookies generally collect information about how visitors use our website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and the pages that they don’t. This helps us to understand and improve the site so it is easy to use and includes helpful content. They allow us to fix bugs or glitches on the website. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies visitors, so we can’t identify you. For example, we use “Google Analytics” cookies (a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc).
Functionality Cookies
These cookies allow our website to remember the choices you make as you browse the site. They provide more enhanced and personal features. The information collected is anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other sites once you leave our site.
The following cookies are set by this website:
| Cookie Name | Purpose | Expiry |
|---|---|---|
| PHPSESSID | To store a simple message when a form is submitted that can be displayed on a different page. | 6 months |
| _ga | Used to distinguish users. | 2 years |
| _gid | Used to distinguish users. | 24 hours |
| catAccCookies | This cookie is set in your computer to prevent the notification from coming up again | 1 month |
| wp-settings-1, wp-settings-time-1 |
WordPress sets a few wp-settings-[UID] cookies. The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table. This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface. |
1 year |
| tk_ai | Stores a randomly-generated anonymous ID. This is only used within the admin area and is used for general analytics tracking. | Session only |
| rl_visitor_history | Set by Capture JS for the Total Live Chat script | Session only |
| __utma | This cookie is used to determine unique visitors to your site and it is updated with each page view. Additionally, this cookie is provided with a unique ID that Google Analytics uses to ensure both the validity and accessibility of the cookie as an extra security measure. | 2 years |
| __utmz | Keeps track of where the visitor came from, what search engine you used, what link you clicked on, what keyword you used, and where they were in the world when you accessed a website. | 6 months |
| tk_tc | This cookie collects metrics about the users use of the website related to the WordPress features so that WordPress can improve their services | Session only |
Third Party cookies |
||
| YSC, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE, SID, HSID, SSID, APISID, SAPISID, LOGIN_INFO, GEUP, PREF | These cookies allow YouTube to collect usage information for YouTube hosted videos | 2 years |
| __stid | Part of the ShareThis sharing button functionality. Unique identifiers given to each computer to allow traffic analysis to ShareThis. ShareThis includes a link in their pop-up box which allows users to specify “Do not track” which deletes cookies as required. | 1 year |
| NID | Used by Google to store user preferences and information of Google maps | 6 months |
How to turn off Cookies
You can turn off cookies at any time, by going into your browser settings, however this may have a detrimental effect on your user experience. If you are happy to continue letting us use cookies in the ways set out in this policy, to help us guide our work, then you need not do anything.
For more information go to http://www.allaboutcookies.org/
