Inspiring Ireland

Inspiring Ireland

Inspiring Ireland is a centralised, curated online portal to Ireland’s cultural heritage. It’s an output of an ambitious project to bring Ireland’s cultural treasures – paintings, letters, sculpture, manuscripts, historical objects, music, photography – both digital and digitised – to a national and international audience. The first of its kind in Ireland, the interactive website offers Ireland’s exceptional cultural heritage from a broad range of galleries, libraries, archives and museums to showcase Irish digital-cultural innovation globally. The project had three phases, outlined below.

Inspiring Ireland Pilot Project

Launched March 2014

The Inspiring Ireland pilot project, consisting of a curated website featuring high quality images of Ireland’s treasured cultural assets, was officially launched at Stanford University on 16th March 2014. The Inspiring Ireland website was also the pilot for a systematic programme in preservation, access and discovery for digital objects in Ireland’s cultural institutions.

The project was the result of an intense and productive collaboration between ten bodies: Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), Department of Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht, Abbey Theatre, Chester Beatty Library, Crawford Art Gallery Cork, Irish Museum of Modern Art, National Archives of Ireland, National Gallery of Ireland, National Library of Ireland, and National Museum of Ireland.

Inspiring Ireland was a finalist in the 2014 Digital Preservation Awards. Inspiring Ireland also won three Ireland eGovernment awards in Jan 2015: Overall Winner, Promoting Ireland Overseas, and Open Source.

Visit the Inspiring Ireland website.

See also the project video.

Inspiring Ireland 1916 

Launched January 2016

Inspiring Ireland 1916 was the next phase of the multiple-award-winning cultural heritage resource Inspiring Ireland. It presented a brand new series of exhibitions of cultural artefacts, stories and interpretation that surrounded the events of 1916.

Available online from January 2016, the exhibitions curated iconic national treasures alongside privately-owned memorabilia gathered at national and international collection days.

Frongoch and 1916 

Launched December 2016

‘Frongoch & 1916: Recreating a Lost Landscape’ was a series of digital exhibitions commemorating the internment of Irish prisoners at the Frongoch internment camp, Wales, in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising.

Funded by the Reconciliation Fund of Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the exhibitions were a collaboration between DRI and the National Libraries and National Museums of Ireland and Wales. This project was the final phase of the Inspiring Ireland project.