On Lampedusa, a familiar disillusion 10 years after its first refugee tragedy

Migrants resting on the streets of Lampedusa. The island is about 70 miles from the coast of north Africa, where the smugglers operate. Photograph: Roberto Salomone/The Guardian

Almost 10 years have passed since José Manuel Barroso uttered the words: “Never again”.

They came as the then president of the European Commission stood before rows of hundreds of coffins, many of them containing the bodies of children and teenagers, lined up in the airport hangar in Lampedusa, the southern Italian island off whose shore they had died in a shipwreck a few days earlier on 3 October 2013.