The moving pictures on display in Temple Bar feature people seeking asylum in Ireland. Photographer Howard Davies talks to Susan McKay

She's a tiny African girl, her face framed by tight black plaits, but her anxious brown eyes look as big as the world. She's the subject of one of the powerful photographs which have been stopping passers-by in their tracks on Dublin's Curved Street in Temple Bar for the past week. The pictures face outward from the windows of Film Base. The little girl is the child of parents who have come to Ireland seeking asylum. The caption on the photograph says she is "waiting for a decision that will define her life". The people in most of the portraits that make up British photographer Howard Davies' new Asyland exhibition are either seeking asylum here or have been granted refugee status.

There's an older African girl, too. Her face is gaunt and haunted, and it's clear her eyes have seen deep trouble. She's standing in the direct provision centre at Mosney in Co Meath. Her caption says that "many refugee children arrive here traumatised by the harrowing experiences that have forced their families to leave their homeland".

Another portrait shows a Roma girl who looks to be on the verge of her teenage years. She's smiling, cautiously. She looks absolutely determined and terribly vulnerable at the same time. She's in the centre at Knocknalisheen in Co Clare. The white buildings in the background look barracks-like, but there are swings and slides in the picture, too.

Other children in the pictures are laughing and messing around. There's one family portrait of a handsome, smiling woman, one hand on her hips, the other holding a buggy, surrounded by a tumble of bright eyed children. Her son, beside her, grins impishly at the camera. "I like her confidence," says Davies. "She looks like she's a very strong person inside. We talked to her for a long time before she agreed to be photographed. She wanted to know what the exhibition was about. It's not my style to show people as victims. I don't go seeking out misery."

Davies has been photographing refugees for two decades now. It started with Vietnamese "boat people" he met in England. He has been to Hong Kong, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Balkans and many African countries. He is struck by the tenacity with which people stay in beleaguered places. Doctors, for example, who keep clinics open even when mortars are hitting the hospitals. "They only leave in extremis," he says.

Davies spent time working in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami, and is about to return there. It is the only natural disaster he has covered. "It was immense and terrible but it was different from mass rape, torture, massacres and the firebombing of villages. Man doing it to man has a different impact. We had a catastrophic decade of wars in the 1990s. All of them generated internally displaced persons or refugees," he says.

Asked what drew him to these people in flight from war and persecution, he sighs. "I've not chosen to go into war photography," he says. "But I feel passionately about the effect of war on children." He has seen many children dying in refugee camps. Now that he has children of his own, he finds it harder and harder to photograph children in distress.

There are a few of his photographs from other parts of the world in the exhibition. One shows a panoramic view of a vast, tightly packed refugee camp in Tanzania, to which many of those who took part in the Rwandan genocide fled in 1994. There is a wrenching one of a Kosovan mother on a bus which is transporting refugees to camps in Macedonia in 1999. "It has a peculiar quality to it, that one," says Davies.

There's also one of a woman from Tuzla, sobbing as she mourns her husband and children who were among the thousands massacred at Srebrenica by the Serbian army in 1996.

"I did a talk to a group of gifted children in the south of England recently and none of them had heard of Srebrenica," says Davies. "It was the biggest massacre in Europe since the second World War and they just hadn't even heard of it."

Photography can be a powerful educational tool, he has found. "I did a talk at a big comprehensive school in Glasgow to coincide with an exhibition. There were a lot of asylum seekers among the students. Afterwards, I was told that their status among their peers really changed. Instead of being treated as if they were second rate, they were being looked up to. The overriding objective is to undo some of the negative images that have been put about."

In this regard, he feels Ireland has managed to avoid the excesses of the UK. One photograph in the exhibition shows a middle-aged white British woman, goggle-eyed with rage, shouting abuse outside a centre for asylum seekers. "Holiday bargain accommodation - free to asylum seekers - crazy Brits will pay," says a banner behind her. Another says, "UK Freeload Central." There is an "obsessive level of denigration" of asylum seekers, he says, reflecting, he thinks, "the paranoia of middle England".

He was impressed by the fact that children are bussed out of centres to Irish schools, bringing at least a measure of integration. However, many of those he spoke to described acute boredom and a sense of isolation after months and even years of waiting for their applications to be processed. "They want to work and make a contribution," he says.

He sensed that there was a lot of underlying tension - and issues of safety for women among a lot of single men.

"People have a lot bottled up," he says. "Mental health issues tend to be neglected." Some of the accommodation is also fairly basic. "Mosney was surreal, all these people in a disused holiday camp. You're wandering through old pool halls."

But if he thinks Ireland seems less racist than the UK, where even Pakistani taxi drivers vent their rage on asylum seekers, he is shocked by our Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell.

"Does he not know what is going on in the world? I couldn't believe it when I heard that he'd talked about people coming here with "cock-and-bull stories". I'd despair of that. It is inflammatory and could have immense repercussions. There is a tiny minority of people who are criminals and racketeers but if you have a good legal process, they can be screened and extradited. Your Minister should go out and see some of the situations that people are fleeing from. Or he should at least read a few Amnesty reports."

He could start by taking a walk down Curved Street one of these days, and meeting the eyes of some of the people in Davies' photographs.