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CALLS HAVE BEEN made on public bodies to cease making use of unpaid interns after it emerged that over half of all government departments have operated unpaid internships within the past five years.
Nine out of 17 departments have confirmed they are either using or have used unpaid interns since August 2014, although one department said it had ceased offering unpaid internships earlier this year following consultation with the Workplace Relations Commission.
The information on the use of unpaid interns in government departments is contained in a series of replies to a parliamentary question by Social Democrats co-leader, Catherine Murphy, who has called on all public bodies to end the practice.
Murphy said the Social Democrats were “absolutely in favour of ending unpaid internships”.
“At this year’s national conference, the party passed a motion to end the practice as we believe all interns should be paid,” said the Kildare North TD.
The Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan, said her department no longer facilitates unpaid internships and had stopped them following consultation with the WRC this year.
Madigan said 17 students had worked as unpaid interns in the department since 2015 including three this year which were “to honour a prior commitment made in good faith”.
The Department of Rural and Community Affairs said public bodies were outside the scope of the current national internship programme.
The eight departments which said they had not made any use of unpaid interns were Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, Agriculture, Rural and Community Affairs, Health, Defence, and the Department of the Taoiseach.
The Department of Communications, Climate Action and the Environment said it has offered a total of eight unpaid internships over the past five years including four in 2019 “to assist applicants gain work experience in their area and to further their skills in seeking employment”.
The Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport said it facilitated students in arranging paid and unpaid internships “where possible” and had recorded 12 unpaid internships since 2014.
The Minister for Education, Joe McHugh said he and his junior minister, Mary Mitchell O’Connor had facilitated interns in their Leinster House offices through a student placement programme.
McHugh said the department had also provided six student work placements in its IT unit since 2015 as well as unpaid work placements to five people from the National Learning Network.
The Department of Housing said it had taken on three unpaid interns since 2014 to facilitate “their educational requirements”.
While it had no ongoing arrangement in place for unpaid internships, the department said it would consider each application on a “case by case” basis.
The Department of Children said it had facilitated six unpaid internships in the past five years but was not in a position to facilitate any now “due to lack of availability of accommodation”.
The Department of Foreign Affairs said it had an arrangement with two international colleges in the US and Poland where short-term placements of up to six weeks were offered on an unpaid basis.
It said 14 unpaid foreign interns had worked in the department since 2014.
The Department of Business said it used one unpaid intern from Fordham University in the US each year “to gain experience and contribute to the work of the Intellectual Property Unit”.
It said the arrangement was “beneficial to both parties”.
The Department of Justice confirmed it operated paid and unpaid “educational placements” as well as placements under the JobBridge scheme but did not have specific figures.
The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection said arrangements which may be described as internships, other than the JobBridge scheme which closed to new applicants in 2016, are not defined by Irish legislation.
“Whether or not a contract of employment is in place will depend on the individual circumstances of the internship,” the spokesperson said.
Minimum wage
The department advised anyone with questions or complaints about the issue of internships to contact the WRC.
The WRC website states that national minimum wage rates apply to work experience placements, work trials, internships and any other employment practice involving unpaid work regardless of the duration of the engagement.
Richard Grogan, a solicitor specialising in employment law, said any intern who carried out any work rather than “shadowing” someone in order to learn how to do a job was entitled to be paid under the law.
“If an intern is asked to photocopy something or input something on a computer that is work and they should be paid at least the national minimum wage,” Grogan said.
If any government department is getting an unpaid intern to do this kind of work, it would be reprehensible and would represent an egregious breach of legislation and standards that they are meant to uphold.
Based on his experience of unpaid interns, Grogan said many were taken on for either the promise of future employment or that it would “look good on their CV”.
However, he said most unpaid interns had “complete ignorance” about their rights under employment legislation.
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What is never mentioned in the media is that Michael Martin and his party bankrupted this country with no growth for 10 years. Had to beg for money from the IMF. All because of their housing policy, etc I haven’t forgotten has any one else ?
@Jimmy Donovan: FG would have done exactly the same if they had been in government.
Their 2007 election manifesto was similar to FF except they also promised to scrap the introduction of eircodes
@Thomas Sheridan: They also wanted to reduce stamp duty which would’ve put more money in developers pockets. Same party different name
@Eddie Garvey: The dogs in the streets know FFG are one party. By calling it two, they get twice the jollies!
@Jimmy Donovan: I haven’t forgotten about Sf screaming across the dail that every type of spending should be increased because ‘the country is awash with money’…..we would have been in a way worse situation if that lot have have been in…..I haven’t forgotten about that any one else?
@John Paul: SF hasn’t spent one cent of government money in this country. Each man, woman, and child currently ows 43k per person. Interest on this is 14 million euros per day.
@Jimmy Donovan: have a read of this article from 2001 by Greg Palast. The interview & verified documents are from Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank.
If people think FF or FG or any other political party, in Ireland, have been running Ireland for the last 67-70 years, they’re sadly mistaken.
@Mr Inbetween: maybe read the linked article before stating “facts”
Ireland has not been an independent country since joining the EEC
@Jimmy Donovan: Public Sector greed also had a lot to do with the Government going bust back in the day.
@John Paul: must look for your comment on the childrens hospital article.
What I would love to know is how such a huge gap between housing required and actual supply has been allowed to develop
We now have a census every 5 years & we have known since the 1990s that the population is going up.
Back in simpler times it would have somebody’s job to ensure enough housing was being built
Now we are tripping over ourselves with experts and reports, but nobody puts their hand up on such a fundamental issue.
And is if that’s not enough we learn that E 1 billion a year is now being spent on accommodation for asylum seekers
This is not a formula for a happy contented country
@Gerry Kelly: the gap is there because it is a controlled market, and those influencing control are interested in making the biggest profit possible from each unit (developers) aided by incompetent govt and govt who are completely competent but rigging the whole thing for their benefit (they or their close allies are in the property game)
@Eddie Garvey: 100% exactly what I’ve been saying for years. The public are being hoodwinked by a combination of the banks/government/media and developers for the last 10 years approx. The shortages of ‘to buy’ and more recently ‘to rent’ is by design and will end in disaster for Joe soaps nationwide
@Gerry Kelly: Building stopped completely in 2008 but the population kept growing.
@Mick Duvanny: and they conveniently forgot to do their job of constructing social housing since ?
Over 1 billion spent on asylum seekers last year.
More than half of new PPS numbers in Ireland were issued to people from outside the EU last year.
Non nationals account for 36% of those in long term Job Seekers Allowance. 90% rise from 2019.
Highest number of working visas for Australia issued to young Irish people in 2023 since the height of the crash in 2009. Never mind all the Irish going to work in Canada, UK, Dubai etc.
We are a small country on the western edge of Europe. We cannot take all these people whilst our own leave. This is population replacement before our very eyes.
6 murders in 6 weeks all involving foreign nationals.
Ireland doesn’t have a housing problem. Ireland has an immigration problem
@JagTune: Exactly right
@JagTune: very well said. Be ready to be called all sorts of names including racist just because you point the reality.
@Mr “JonnieBoy” Johnson: Do you really care if the race-baiters call you names?
@Housing Hunger Games: this is the same public that voted in Martin and Harris on a first count ,I wouldn’t put alot of stock in the brain power of the Irish voting public at the minute.
Fact is we have a massive problem,these people are not like the polish who all appeared at the start of the boom,they have no intention of working in factories or building sites,massive dole merchants and feck all else
Brown field sites could be brought into use overnight if the political will was there, we saw during covid how quickly things can be done with emergency legislation.
Didn’t they say that the last time and the time before that and the time before that.
all fine and well but will Lowry approve
@Gerry Ryan: depends on if he can sell a discounted property to his kids through a shelf company. Sorry, that was some Lowrey guy, I get confused sometimes
@Gerry Ryan: Depends if he has an interest in it, like the LIDL that was built during Covid when not one house was allowed to be built.
After engorging themselves with salary increases.
What about easing the co.councils ban on mobile a nd chalet type homes in large gardens in country? Remember the man Tipperary Council took to court for housing himself in one…on his own land He is not the only one. Recently the same to man who housed his relations in Limerick. Many could house a son or daughter in their instead of them paying huge rents,miles away from elderly parents
@Helena Camella Cummins: There is no land in this country that the state doesn’t own, read the constitution and he didn’t bother getting plannjng permission, the part that a lot like to forget. I mean that is the first thing to do before building anything.
Housing for all is nonsense. No country can house 8 billion people
So we’ll have a 5k fine with near zero enforcement. Given the money to be made in short term lets, this will just be seen as a cost/liability and ignored
This is just the same meaningless talking in circles around the issue of housing as always, while actually doing nothing to solve it.
The brass neck of these absolute muppets and the contempt that they show to the people of Ireland beggers belief. They now say that they need time to draft a plan to deal with the housing crisis and a response to it????
They are acting like they didn’t just spend 4 years in government supposedly addressing the exact same housing crisis????
But now they say that have to start from square one, and the people of Ireland are going to just swallow this rubbish all over again?
Nobody likes the idea of lazy people that don’t want to work ever, getting low cost social housing while milking the system, but we are beyond that as a nation.
Because families in which both people are working full-time cannot afford a place to live, those people need access to social housing now, but its not only them, young people are facing the prospect of being homeless or under threat of homelessness regardless of how hard they work to build a future for themselves, older people on pensions are also struggling to pay for accommodation, is this what we want our government to deliver to the people of the country, more excuses, grand plans that deliver nothing and meaningless soundbites?
There is only one answer to the housing crisis, building social housing now on a massive scale.
Same course of action that crashed the economy as that’s there only plan. Protect their business lobbyists friends that roll up every year that control the land banks
I would recommend more tax breaks for the buyers and keep tax breaks for the developers. What would I know, I’m not on a TDs salary and live in the real world.
“Housing for all plan”…heard that years ago…yaaaaaaaaawn.
Yet again our so called Government and opposition are so full of sh**.
Keep it simple – no short term letting without Planning Permission . Enforce it correctly with huge fines for owner and operators like Air B&B and Booking.com. – this means the sector will settle down and inflated prices all round will be more controlled!
FG is
FG
Stop talking and DO something radical, that does NOT mean cancel the RPZs, bring in much tighter controls so that our own citizens can afford to live properly.
have your say