Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)

The notion of internship is a good one but I am wary of it as there is a need for some form of control. A builder may take on an intern to teach him or her how to lay paving brick. One may think it is easy to lay paving brick but most people still cannot do it right after several years. If an employer is honest and teaches that person to lay paving brick, that will be beneficial, but a builder may use that intern to carry bricks to a person who lays them. That is different as the intern would be replacing somebody the builder would have had to pay as a labourer. Likewise, a person may get a job in a kitchen where a chef can teach that person to cook, which would be beneficial as an experience. However, an employer may have that intern chopping carrots and parsnips all the time, which means he or she is learning nothing but is replacing a paid employee.

I am sure we agree that employers will vary so there will be employers who are straight and honest, treating the internship scheme as they should. However, unless there is some form of control there will be many employers abusing the system. The breakdown will probably be half and half. I have not thought it through and I am sure it would be very difficult to control the scheme but the Government must consider how to monitor the process. I suspect 50% of it will be abused if that is not done.

The building construction industry had a brilliant apprenticeship scheme for years but it died, mainly because it was used as a form of slave labour. If a man wanted to serve his time as a carpenter 30 years ago he would be attached to somebody who had just been given his papers as having served his five years as an apprentice. That is how people learned to be a carpenter over five years and the system worked really well, with a good flow of carpenters coming through the system all the time. Sadly, builders began to abuse the process and young people would not be left with a carpenter. A person may have been with a carpenter for three or four months before being told to work a cement mixer, using sand, gravel, cement and water to make concrete. That is manual labour.

I have spent 35 years on building sites and too often I saw the apprenticeship scheme badly abused by a builder. The scheme ended up dying a sad death because it was abused. It was a terrible pity because we ran out of tradesmen. In the boom between 2000 and 2006 one could not get a carpenter and one would be frightened by what we had to pay carpenters in order to get work done. That was because they were so scarce. We were lucky to have a flow of good workers from eastern Europe because if it had not existed, the scarcity would have been worse. One may argue that we would have been better if those workers had not arrived as we might not have built so much. It is a chicken and egg scenario.

If the internship programme is to work well, it must be monitored. If there is no control, 50% of it may work well but the other 50% will be abused. Those comments come from my experience.

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