Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the world's worst nuclear accident.
The Irish-based Chernobyl Children's Project International has called on each of the 32 counties on the island to raise funds for victims of the Chernobyl disaster.
The founder of the project, Adi Roche, says her organisation wants to raise €1.6 million to build 32 homes that will house more than 300 children in Belarus.
The UN estimates that seven million people, half of them children, in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were affected when a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986.
Ukraine has being paying homage to victims of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, described by Kiev as a global catastrophe.
Overnight, about 100 people joined President Viktor Yushchenko and other top state officials to lay wreaths at a victims' monument in Kiev and to light candles at a memorial service.
An overnight vigil was held in Slavutich, a small town 50km from the wrecked nuclear power station, where most of its personnel were once based.
On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, contaminating large parts of Europe but especially what was then Soviet Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
It was the worst civilian nuclear disaster in history.
Estimates of the number of deaths directly related to the accident vary. Ukrainian officials say over 25,000 people, known as liquidators, died getting the accident under control and constructing a concrete shield over the wreckage.
A United Nations toll published in September 2005 set the number of victims at just 4,000, although this figure is challenged by non-governmental organisations.
The Chernobyl plant was only fully shut down in December 2000.
Work on a new sarcophagus, a steel shield 190m wide and 200m long, should start in October with a completion target of 2012.
The new shell will replace the badly cracked concrete version designed to seal off some 200 tonnes of radioactive magma made up of nuclear fuel.
The new shield will weigh about 18,000 tonnes, more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has pledged UN assistance for the stricken region's renewal.
In a statement to mark the anniversary, he noted that the UN General Assembly had proclaimed 2006-2016 a 'decade of recovery and sustainable development" for the Chernobyl area.
