merrion street

Announcing today’s launch of the summer round of funding under the Simon Cumbers' Media Fund, Minister of State for Trade & Development Jan O’Sullivan focused on the media’s important role to inform and educate "your audiences about the hunger, poverty and injustice that afflict so many millions of our fellow human beings and have implications for our future.”

The Simon Cumbers' Media Fund was established by Irish Aid in memory of Irish journalist Simon Cumbers, who was killed in Saudi Arabia while working with the BBC in 2004.  The aim of the fund is to promote more and better quality coverage of development issues in the Irish media.

Chairperson of the Fund’s judging panel, Bob Collins noted that “there is still a huge appetite among the Irish media to cover development issues, largely in part because of our tradition of supporting development.  The Simon Cumbers’ Media Fund is one way of assisting the media to cover stories that it might otherwise not have the resources to cover.”