Rosita Boland and Frank Miller were recipients of the summer 2014 round of the Simon Cumbers Media Fund. They traveled to Sicily to look at why tens of thousands of African people have risked their lives over the last 14 years to travel by unseaworthy boats from North Africa, to now notorious italian island of Lampedusa, and seek refugee status.

Rosita had a series of articles with a number of photographs by Frank, published in The Irish Times. To read the first article, ‘Journeys of death: boat people of the southern Mediterranean’,published on Friday, 3rd October 2014, please click here. A video entitled, ‘Mass Migration in Sicily’ was broadcast online on irishtimes.com on Friday, 3rd October 2014. To watch the video, please click here. Rosita’s second article entitled, ‘Child migrants of the Mediterranean pay a high price’ was published on Sunday, 5th October 2014. Click here to read this article. The final article of the series was published on Monday, 6th October 2014. To read this article, please click here.