Who we are
McCare Limited is a private company limited by shares, incorporated in Ireland under company registration number 767533. Our registered address is 49–51 Amiens Street, Dublin 1, D01 FN24, Ireland.
McCare Limited is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. That means we are the organisation responsible for deciding how and why it is used, and we are accountable for looking after it.
For general enquiries, contact us at admin@mccare.ie or +353 87 382 9533. For anything to do with your personal data, our Data Protection Lead is Brendan Dee — see Contacting us about your data below.
What this policy covers
This policy covers the personal information we collect through this website and through the enquiries, referrals and job applications that reach us as a result: the contact form, emails and phone calls that follow, and the basic technical records our hosting provider keeps.
It does not cover the care records we hold about the children, young people and adults who use our services. Those records are governed by separate internal policies and by statutory requirements, including the Child Care Act 1991, the Health Act 2007, Children First and the standards and regulations our services are inspected against. If you are a young person, a family member, a social worker or an advocate asking about care records, please contact us directly and we will explain how those records are handled and how you can access them.
Information we collect
We keep this to what we actually need.
- Contact and referral enquiries. When you use the form on our contact page, we collect your name, your email address, the short reason for getting in touch, and the message you write. Please don't include identifying details about a young person in a web form — we'll move that to a secure call or a protected channel once we've made contact.
- Email and phone correspondence. If you email or call us, we keep the correspondence and any details you give us so we can deal with your enquiry properly and pick up the thread later.
- Recruitment applications. If you apply for a role, we collect the information in your CV, cover letter and application: contact details, work history, qualifications, registration details and referees. Where a role requires it, later stages involve Garda vetting and reference checks, which we will always explain to you before they happen.
- Technical records. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs — IP address, browser type, pages requested, time of request — to deliver the site, keep it secure and detect abuse. We don't use advertising or analytics cookies on this website, and we don't build profiles of visitors.
How we use your information
- To answer your enquiry and get back to you, usually within two working days.
- To handle referrals and placement discussions with the referring social worker, Tusla and other statutory partners.
- To manage recruitment: assessing applications, arranging interviews, taking up references and completing pre-employment checks.
- To improve our services — understanding the questions people ask us and where our information falls short.
- To meet our legal, regulatory and safeguarding obligations, including our duties under Children First and to our regulators.
We do not use your information for automated decision-making or profiling, and we never sell it.
Our lawful bases for using it
Under the GDPR we must have a lawful basis for using personal data. Depending on the situation, we rely on:
- Consent — where you have chosen to contact us and asked us to respond. You can withdraw consent at any time.
- Legitimate interests — running and improving our services, responding to professional enquiries, recruiting staff and keeping our website secure, where doing so does not override your rights.
- Legal obligation — where the law requires us to hold or disclose information, including child protection and welfare reporting, regulatory inspection, and employment and tax law.
- Performance of a task carried out in the public interest — where it applies to the delivery of care services commissioned by Tusla or the HSE.
- Substantial public interest and the provision of health or social care — the additional conditions that apply where special category data, such as health information, is necessary to the care we provide.
Who we share it with
We share personal information only where we need to, and only with:
- Tusla, the HSE and our regulators — including Tusla's Alternative Care Inspection and Monitoring Service and the Health Information and Quality Authority — where sharing is required by law, by a placement agreement, or to protect someone's safety.
- An Garda Síochána — where there is a child protection or criminal matter, or a risk to someone's safety.
- Service providers who work for us — the company that hosts this website and processes form submissions, our email provider, and our IT support. They act on our instructions under a written contract, may only use the data to provide the service, and cannot use it for their own purposes.
- Professional advisers — such as our legal or HR advisers, where we need advice on a specific matter.
We never sell personal data, and we never share it for marketing. Where a provider processes data outside the European Economic Area, we make sure appropriate safeguards approved under the GDPR are in place.
How long we keep it
We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, and then we delete it securely.
- Website enquiries that don't lead anywhere are kept for up to twelve months, so we can pick up the thread if you come back to us.
- Unsuccessful job applications are kept for up to twelve months, and longer only if you ask us to hold your details for future roles.
- Care and placement records are retained for the periods set by our statutory and regulatory obligations, which are considerably longer, so that a person who has been in care can access their own record in later life.
- Employment records are kept for the periods required by employment, revenue and regulatory law.
Keeping it safe
We use technical and organisational measures appropriate to the sensitivity of the information we hold: access limited to the people who need it for their role, secure systems and encrypted connections, confidentiality obligations in every contract of employment, and data protection training for our team. Any breach that poses a risk to people's rights is reported to the Data Protection Commission within the statutory timeframe, and to the people affected where the risk is high.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you, and get a copy of it.
- Rectification — have inaccurate or incomplete information corrected.
- Erasure — ask us to delete information, where we have no continuing legal or statutory reason to keep it.
- Restriction — ask us to pause our use of your information while a question about it is resolved.
- Data portability — receive certain information in a common, machine-readable format, or have it sent to another organisation.
- Object — object to our use of your information where we rely on legitimate interests.
- Withdraw consent at any time, where consent is what we relied on. Withdrawing it doesn't affect anything we did beforehand.
To exercise any of these, contact our Data Protection Lead below. We will respond within one month. There is no charge. Some rights have limits — for example, we cannot delete a record we are legally required to retain — and if that applies we will explain why in plain language rather than simply refusing.
You also have the right to complain to the supervisory authority, the Data Protection Commission, at www.dataprotection.ie. We would rather you came to us first so we have the chance to put things right, but you are entitled to go to them at any point.
Contacting us about your data
Our Data Protection Lead is Brendan Dee. He is the person to contact with any question about this policy, about the information we hold, or to exercise any of the rights above.
- Email: brendan@mccare.ie
- Phone: 087 384 2818
- Post: Data Protection Lead, McCare Limited, 49–51 Amiens Street, Dublin 1, D01 FN24, Ireland
For general enquiries that aren't about data protection, email admin@mccare.ie or call +353 87 382 9533.
Changes to this policy
We review this policy regularly and will update it when our services, systems or legal obligations change. The date at the top of the page always shows the current version. Where a change materially affects how we use your information, we will make that clear rather than quietly amending the text.