The IRFU yesterday informed their Welsh and Scottish counterparts that they had rejected the proposed Celtic League, essentially because the 22-game format of the mooted competition would overcrowd an already congested fixture list. Furthermore, in that scenario something would have to suffer and it would almost certainly be the All-Ireland League.

At a media briefing in the Berkeley Court yesterday, fronted by the union's senior vice-president Eddie Coleman, chief executive Philip Browne and director of rugby Eddie Wigglesworth, it was confirmed that the IRFU committee considered the proposal last Friday following meetings between representatives of all three celtic unions in Dublin about six weeks ago.

The proposed league was to include seven Welsh clubs, both Scottish super districts and three Irish provinces - Munster, Leinster and Ulster. Starting next season, the league was to run for a further two to three seasons, subject to review. It would have embraced a 22-game format, starting in mid-August and finishing in mid-May.

Coleman explained the rationale for the IRFU's decision: "It was the view of the committee that such a structure involved too many games when coupled with European Cup games, our national commitments to the Six Nations tournament, autumn internationals and IRB June touring programmes.

"No other option was acceptable to either Scotland or Wales at that time. We tried to reduce it to something that we thought we could bring back here, but it wasn't a runner. They demanded 22 games," said Coleman.

"That number would cause us enormous problems," he said. He said that the increased load on home-based international players would have meant up to 41 games in a season, excluding any club commitments whatsoever. "The IRFU believe that future structures must give recognition to the limit of 30-32 games per season for our nationally contracted players."

Accordingly, Coleman and the other IRFU negotiators, Wigglesworth and Noel Murphy, negotiated with the Jim Telfer and Terry Cobner-led Scottish and Welsh delegations to decrease the number of proposed games. However, both the Welsh clubs and Scottish districts required a minimum number of about 11-14 competitive home games per season.

"We came from a different end of the stick altogether which is very much from the national end of the stick and looked at what it meant in terms of our nationally contracted players," said Wrigglesworth. "It was just simply too much and particularly when you looked at the size of what we would call our elite playing base." Not surprisingly too given the IRFU committee is almost completely made up of club representatives, there is a strong desire to maintain a three-tiered structure in which the clubs/AIL obtain a slice of the cake, albeit the lowest tier.

Ideally, the IRFU would like to add in another three or four representative games for the provinces, in recognition of the need for additional games of higher intensity. The need is particularly acute, according to the IRFU's highly respected and recently appointed fitness director Liam Hennessy, in the weekends immediately before the Six Nations championship.

Therefore, the IRFU would like an extension of the European Cup format to increase the minimum number of games from six to about 10, as the Irish delegation made clear to their celtic counterparts.

"If we had that," said Wigglesworth, "then we'd have the closest thing in the northern hemisphere to the Super 12, and that was the way we wanted to go." However, the contrasting needs of the celtic unions are underlined by the fact that the Welsh recently voted in favour of an extension to the European Cup, whereas the Scots voted against it.

Hence without an expanded European Cup, the IRFU are considering playing four rounds of the Interprovincial Championship prior to the European Cup at the start of the season, and saving the last couple of rounds until the two weekends before the Six Nations.

Another flaw in the Welsh/Scottish proposal, from an IRFU standpoint, was that the Celtic League would only have a guaranteed shelf-life of two years. As Coleman pointed out yesterday, what would happen then if, say, the Scots and Welsh linked up with the oft-suggested British League?

The lack of slack coming from the Welsh and Scots effectively gave the IRFU no option except to say" thanks but no thanks." It could well be that the union's fellow celts will now come back with an alternate proposal, but even then it's difficult to see how the IRFU can accommodate them.