Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), which include state-funded apprenticeships, have long been used as a way of encouraging unemployed youth into skilled and semi-skilled trades. However, new forms of ‘non-standard’ employment are now dominating young people’s experience of the labour market. In fact, unpaid internships are becoming a normal part of a modern curriculum vitae and viewed as a necessary rite of passage for a successful school-to-work transfer, especially in the middle-class professions. Through the use of freedom of information requests, policy documents, evaluation reports and semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the role of unpaid internships in shaping the four most recent ALMPs targeted at Irish youth since the Great Recession (2008). It theorises that the increased prevalence of unpaid internships in the entry level jobs market leads to Irish policymakers designing youth unemployment ALMPs based on a private-sector unpaid internship model. This paper will first situate youth unemployment policy within the literature on ALMPs and unpaid internships. It will then combine process tracing as a within case research method with a comparative case study of the four ALMPs. In conclusion, this paper finds that Irish youth unemployment policy designed during periods of economic crisis tends to prioritise the needs of host organisations and mirror employment norms established through unpaid internships. Conversely, during periods of economic growth, Irish youth unemployment policy reverts to a more regulated model that protects the entry level jobs market. Furthermore, this paper recommends that European states should prohibit the use of unpaid internships in order to avoid further entrenching precarious and discriminatory work patterns.