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Bus stop, Galway, 2012

Direct provision is a scheme whereby asylum seekers are provided with accommodation on a full board basis with all their basic needs. It was introduced by the government as a pilot scheme in November 1999 (FLAC, 2009).
While living in direct provision centres, asylum seekers receive weekly allowance of €19.10 per adult and €9.60 per child. In 2004 there were 74 centres dispersed throughout the country. Currently there are a total of 34 former Hotels, Holiday Homes, Army Barracks, and Convents, located in 16 counties in the Republic of Ireland.   
Asylum Archive is directly concerned with the reality and trauma of life for asylum seekers.
Asylum Archive is a repository of asylum in Ireland that adopts Auto- ethnographic and Foucauldian discourse analysis through the language of visual anthropology (Pratt, 1991, 1992; Foucault, 1975; Pink, 2006).
In its practice, Asylum Archive employs fieldwork research through the process of taking photographs of the direct provision centre’s and found discarded or abandoned artefacts, conducting video and audio records with human rights advocates and activists, collecting publications, reports, scholarly essays, newspaper articles and epistemic research that includes the following disciplines; ethnography (Strauss, 1958), visual anthropology (Pink, 2006), philosophy (Foucault, 1975; Habermas 1962; Arendt, 1963) and the cultural theory (Bhabha, 1994; Fannon, 1952; Benjamin, 1936; Hall, 1986).
Asylum Archive’s objective is to collaborate with asylum seekers, artists, cultural workers, sociologists, philosophers, human rights workers, social activists, theorists, immigration lawyers, in the process of creating a national and international platform that deals with issues of exile and asylum, displacement, trauma and memory, transnational migration and immigration policy.
Asylum Archive has an essential visual, informative and educational perspective. 
This is to help to establish better relations and understanding around asylum issues.