The quiet privilege powering Ireland’s internships

Students without family connections or addresses east of the Shannon face an uphill battle to access the same opportunities as their peers

Internship. Noun. The position of a student or trainee who works in an organisation, sometimes without pay, in order to gain work experience or satisfy requirements for a qualification.

But for many students in the West of Ireland, that definition is starting to feel painfully incomplete. More accurate, perhaps, would be this:

Internship. Noun. A competitive gateway guarded by postcode privilege, family connections, and unpaid labour disguised as opportunity.

This summer, a wave of students from non-Dublin, working-class backgrounds are once again watching their LinkedIn feeds fill with smiling faces in suits: peers interning at Arthur Cox, PwC, Deloitte, RTÉ. For Rachel, a Galway graduate with a degree in Law, Sociology and Politics, it’s a harsh reminder of just how much she’s been shut out of a system that claims to be open to all.

“I’ve been applying for the last two years to any big firms,” she said. “I’ve never had an interview back from any of them.”

Rachel went on to detail the hard work she has put in over the past four years: “I’ve been the auditor of a society, I’ve had a job within the Students’ Union. None of these things seem to appeal to those who are hiring for internships.”

What Rachel hasn’t got, though, is what too many Irish internships now quietly demand: family connections.

“My mum and aunts are nurses […] my dad’s an accountant, so we wouldn’t really know any lawyers.” Rachel says. “I’ve never had someone come up to me in a family friend kind of way, and say, ‘hey, I know this person, they work in a firm. You could work with them for a month in the summer. I’ve never had that.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Patrick*, a final-year law student who scoured Galway city and the wider county for legal placements.

“I didn’t hear back from anybody, mainly because a lot of the places said that the partners in the firm had already hired nephews or relatives or somebody that the secretary knew. It was really just people within their circle”

Patrick, like Rachel, also flagged the painful double bind of entry-level legal work: experience is required to get experience.

“I applied for a lot of legal secretary-type jobs but I couldn’t get anything because I had no experience, and I can’t get experience because I have no experience. It’s an endless circle.”

Meanwhile, Rachel described watching less qualified peers land roles through personal ties:

“Some of them, they might not be the smartest. They can get into somewhere because of their family.”

Both students pointed to a deeper East/West divide embedded in the culture of Irish internships. Patrick, who is from East Galway County, described having to change the address on his CV because he suspected it was harming his chances.

“Employers will see my address and won’t even look [at my CV].” He said.

Patrick also explained that even if he was offered an internship in Dublin, he’d either have to commute for six hours daily, spending upwards of €80 a week on transport costs, or relocating to the capital, where he could be forced to fork out about €1,000 per month on accommodation in return for a very possibly unpaid internship.

Rachel, too, said she’d seen the bias up close:

“I’ve definitely seen a huge amount of people from UCD especially, and Trinity who get into these firms. And they’re lucky because they have accommodation there […] I’ve seen two people in my entire college life [from Galway] being accepted into these firms for an internship.”

The emotional toll of all this is hard to overstate. Both students describe feeling overlooked, disillusioned, and increasingly doubtful of their career path.

“It hurts your confidence,” Patrick admitted. “But now I have this feeling that my degree is not worth anything and ‘is it me? Have I done something?’”

Patrick goes on to tell me how he was on his lunch break in Galway city, where he works in retail, and saw somebody from his Law class that wasn’t from Galway, walking out of a law firm where they were visibly working for the summer.

“I’m from Galway and nowhere would take me […] I guess he might have just gotten lucky and I didn’t.” Patrick told me

Rachel said: “It’s detrimental. I’ve worked so hard for the past four years. I’ve overcome so many things, even in my personal life, and no one wants to take me on and say ‘would you want to come and work for us?’ even for two weeks or something.”

At the core of this issue is an unspoken reality: Irish internships are reinforcing class and location privilege. They demand unpaid or underpaid labour, they cluster in Dublin, and they lean heavily on who you know. Students from professional families enter college with a Rolodex of quiet advantages: the uncle who’s a barrister, the neighbour who’s a partner at a firm, the godparent who can arrange a summer placement.

Research in 2017 by advertising agency Chemistry found that 52% of Irish internships were unpaid or only covered expenses – a stark indication that work experience is often accessible only to those who can afford it.

Adding another layer to this inequality, The Irish News reported earlier this year that just 35% of working-class graduates secure internships, compared to 55% of middle-class graduates.

Rachel and Patrick both believe structural changes are needed: subsidising placements in smaller towns, introducing blind recruitment, and enforcing fair pay standards for interns.

As for what advice they’d give to students in similar situation?

Rachel said, “There’s a one-in-a-million chance if you’re like me […] It’s just really dismal.”

Patrick added: “Stick with it. What’s for you won’t pass you.”

In a country obsessed with meritocracy, the question must now be asked: is the internship pipeline working for the brightest, or just the best connected?

*Not his real name.