It´ s all about an Irishman, who came to nowadays Ukraine more than 200 years ago, felt in love with the region – and stayed…
Since last September we are intensively communicating with representatives of the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, for we want to establish long term relations between us, Ukrainian and Irish partners.
The overall idea for this project is to establish international links through the promotion and celebration of the shared twin-nation history of garden and landscape design between Ireland and the Ukraine. This will act as the key instrument to foster current and future cooperation between the creative and cultural economies of both Ireland and Ukraine.
The focus of this project is the Irish landscape designer Dionizy Mikler (Denis McClair 1762-1853), and his personal story and fascinating life. He left his home country Ireland in the late 1790s and was, invited by the noble Czartoryksi family, to work in Poland and nowadays Ukraine and brought the first ideas of modern landscape design to nowadays Ukraine, where he has designed more than 50 parks. His unusual life and creative lifestyle serve as the cultural and emotive background of the project.
This project aims to shape the brand of McClair as a symbol of common Ukrainian and Irish landscape heritage through researching his legacy, digitalising the results and integrating them into a readily accessible online platform. This platform is expected to increase the visibility of the cultural brand within selected target groups and to boost further Irish-Ukrainian cooperation in landscape design and other related sectors of the creative industry.
Around this project we plan a lot of other activities, first of all we want to set up an Irish-Ukrainian working group (MCC) to discuss with its active members in which fields of cooperation we should go forward. Besides the McClair Project itself (we hope to get it funded by House of Europe grant programme, we applied for), it would be great to organise youth and cultural exchanges, especially between Westmeath County and the regions, where McClair lived and worked (Volyn and Podilia)
The cooperation agreement with NBG was signed on May, 4. Its our first cooperation with Ireland, we are proud and happy about this and appreciate the trust of our Irish partners and their interest in Ukraine.
