Our Project
Welcome to Inspiring Ireland
Inspiring Ireland is a growing project to make Ireland's digital cultural heritage available to everyone, and to provide rich themes and narratives to contextualise that heritage. This project of the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) first launched in 2014 with a beautiful collection of objects from eight of Ireland's national cultural institutions. Artfully grouped into three broad but fundamental themes — Sense of Place, Sense of Identity, Sense of Freedom — these initial exhibitions provide a window into Ireland's rich social and cultural heritage. The pilot project quickly received accolades, and won three Ireland eGovernment Awards in early 2015, including the year's overall winner.
About Inspiring Ireland 1916
For 2016, a new phase of Inspiring Ireland commemorated the centenary of the Easter Rising, supported by Ireland 2016 via the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Minister for Diaspora Affairs at the Department of the Taoiseach. Titled Inspiring Ireland 1916: Weaving Public and Private Narratives, this phase continued the collaboration with stewards of public content — the National Archives of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland, and RTÉ Archives — and also opened the site to objects from personal collections.
Through a series of collection days, the public could bring treasured objects from 1916 to be digitised, recorded, catalogued, preserved for the long term in DRI, and shared via Inspiring Ireland. Through these two avenues — the public and the private — Inspiring Ireland 1916 paints a picture of the celebrated and the undiscovered objects that shaped both the large events and the everyday happenings of 1916.
A later series, Frongoch and 1916: Recreating a Lost Landscape, was made possible through the Reconciliation Fund of the Irish Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with collections from Ireland and Wales.
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