Fewer than 400 interns kept on by companies

FEWER THAN 400 people who served internships under the JobBridge scheme have been employed on normal contracts by the companies which took them on, Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton said yesterday.

However, she robustly defended the national internship scheme and insisted it was delivering on its promise of improving the employment prospects for thousands of participants.

Ms Burton was speaking after announcing an additional 1,000 extra places on the scheme, which is also being extended to include people in receipt of one-parent family payment and the disability allowance.

Since it was launched last summer, almost 7,000 internships have been filled under JobBridge, the majority with private sector employers. Martin Murphy, managing director of HP Ireland and chairman of the national internship steering group, said 797 of those who had completed the scheme had gone into full-time employment, with 40 per cent being given jobs with companies where they served internships.

Ms Burton accepted the scheme had “teething problems” in the early stages but insisted these had been “ironed out”. She said measures had been introduced to protect interns and to ensure the integrity of the scheme. “It would be disappointing if a focus of a few isolated cases was used to detract from the scheme or discourage potential interns.”

She defended companies using the programme to find low-skilled workers to perform tasks such as loading trucks. “Low-skilled individuals have a right to access an activation measure that is specifically designed to improve their skills, enhance their experience and improve their chances of securing employment in the future,” she said.

Ms Burton also insisted opportunities would only be approved “if they can show that the intern will receive a broad and practical work experience that will involve significant learning outcomes for the intern”.

She said the Department of Social Protection was involved in the “continuous monitoring of internships to ensure that the placement provides appropriate training and development experience; and that appropriate mentoring and support is provided to the intern”.

Ms Burton also said a full independent evaluation of JobBridge had been commissioned but said “the initial data suggests that it has been very successful in meeting the objectives we initially set and it is making a real contribution to helping unemployed people re-engage with the workplace”.

Mr Murphy said he had received “very positive feedback on JobBridge from business people across the spectrum”.

He added: “The National Internship Scheme is now hardwired into the range of opportunities open to those who want to get back into the workplace.”

Sinn Féin’s social protection spokesman Aengus Ó Snodaigh described plans to extend the scheme as “outrageous” and said it was “displacing real jobs”.

“The reality is that the JobBridge programme is facilitating job displacement and exploitation,” he said.