A consortium put together by an Irish company has won the corporate hospitality contract for next year's Rugby World Cup.

Slattery Pascoe Associates, a subsidiary of Slattery Public Relations, has formed a partnership with four British firms to establish Rugby Hospitality which hopes to generate turnover of £36 million sterling (£40.4 million) and profits of more than £7 million from the contract.

The World Cup, to be played in stadiums in Britain and the Republic, will be the biggest staged in the sport and a large number of consortiums tendered for the contract.

Slattery Pascoe Associates already does most of the corporate hospitality at Lansdowne Road and will have sole rights for all the World Cup games to be played at the ground.

That experience prompted Mr Padraig Slattery, managing director of Slattery PR, to contact the other companies to try and challenge for the Rugby World Cup contract.

The other four companies in the consortium are the English catering company, Leatherby & Christopher, Cavendish, corporate hospitality specialists, Murray International, which has a substantial shareholding in Glasgow Rangers Football Club and Matchpoint, another corporate hospitality group.

The consortium has declined to say how much it paid for the contract but the figure involved is understood to be in the region of £4 million.

The company will generate the turnover during October 1999 and the resulting profits will be shared equally between the five partners.

An office has been set up in London to generate business for the consortium which expects to deal with 60,000 individuals during the tournament. The consortium expects the majority of tickets to be sold months in advance of the competition. Half of the seats for the final in Wales have already been sold.

Tickets entitling the holder to corporate hospitality will be expensive. For example, a ticket for the Ireland-Australia game will cost £395 (excluding VAT), while the final in the Millennium stadium in Cardiff will cost £850 sterling (excluding VAT).

Mr Slattery says for this price comes the "best seats in the house", lunch in a reserved hospitality area, a chance to meet rugby stars from the past, a private bar and large screen televisions to view other matches.

The new consortium has also devised a ticket protection arrangement. This means that deposits on tickets paid by clients will be held in a special trust until the tickets ordered are provided. Mr Slattery says he expects a significant number of tickets to be sold to overseas companies.

Mr Slattery says a decent run from the Irish Rugby team in the forthcoming five nations tournament would be a boost for the potential of the project.

One risk involved, however, is if a team with a small support base in Europe finds itself progressing through the tournament.

"If teams like France and Ireland are knocked out early and replaced by somebody like Tonga then we could be in trouble," Mr Slattery says.

However, he points out that the after the soccer World Cup and the Olympics this is the third biggest event in the world sporting calendar. "What we want for commercial and personal reasons is some good rugby being played," he adds.