What are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files stored on your device by a web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) that hold information about your previous visits to our site. On returning to our site this stored information is fed back to us allowing us to offer you a more personal browsing experience. By using our site you consent to cookies being used in accordance with our policy. For more information on cookies, visit www.ico.org.uk or www.dataprotection.ie.

Why are we telling you this?

EU law requires website operators to ask for permission before using certain kinds of cookies. To ensure you are completely aware of the types of cookies we use and to enable us to continue to bring you the best possible browsing experience, we are giving you a detailed outline of the cookies we use and their unique role in your browsing experience.

What cookies do we use?

Our website uses the following types of cookies:

1. Strictly necessary cookies – These technical cookies enable you to navigate our site and gain full access to its features and secure areas. Without these cookies essential services, you have asked for, cannot be provided.

2. Functionality cookies – These cookies remember choices you made on previous visits to our site such as your username, language or region so we can provide enhanced, more personal features. They can also be used to remember changes you’ve made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages you can customise. Functionality cookies can also be used to provide services you have previously asked for such as watching videos or commenting on a blog. The information collected by these cookies may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other sites.

3. Performance cookies (Google analytics cookies) – These cookies remember information about how you and other customers use our website. This gives us vital information such as which pages are visited most often and if customers are receiving error messages from certain pages. The role of these cookies is to allow us to analyse and improve the performance of our website ensuring you receive a consistent look, feel and shopping experience. Performance cookies don’t collect any information that identifies the customer and all information collected is aggregated and therefore anonymous.

Managing Cookies

Can I disable cookies from your website?

It is possible to stop your browser accepting cookies from particular websites. However, disabling cookies from our site will mean you lose a lot of functionality, which will have a detrimental impact on your browsing experience and mean that you only have limited access to personalised areas of the site. How to block or delete cookies? We have explained to you what cookies are and what they do, you can delete or disable cookies if you want to and the links below will explain how to do this. It is possible to block some or all cookies, or even to delete cookies that have already been set, but you need to be aware that you might lose some of the functionality of the website by blocking strictly necessary cookies that are outlined above.

If you wish to restrict or block the web browser cookies set on your device, you can do this through your browser settings; the Help function within your browser explains how to change these settings:

You can also visit www.allaboutcookies.org, which contains comprehensive information on how to manage cookies on a wide variety of desktop browsers.

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.