Groundhog Day in Leinster at the weekend. Without the laughs. Being reasonable, you have to concede that all great, record-breaking sequences probably include the same feeling of déjà vu, writes Seán Moran

With Kilkenny clearly superior to the pack in their province, what else is to be expected? It may be gratifying for Kilkenny to make history but it's also an indictment of more than simply coaching and development standards in other counties.

The provincial system isn't working, particularly in hurling. It was conceived for practical reasons over a century ago in a time when the travel and communications infrastructure of today would have been the stuff of science fiction.

The question at the start of the 21st century is: does it work anymore? At an administrative level the provincial units are a necessary intermediary between counties and Croke Park but as a framework for intercounty competition you'd never invent them if you were designing championships from scratch.

Times change and the pressure on the GAA from other sports is such that the stagnation caused by declining levels of competition becomes a promotional crisis and by extension a developmental one.

A tangential point is that the two counties who hold the record for senior provincial titles, Kerry footballers (67) and Kilkenny hurlers (61), are in a position to concentrate almost exclusively on the one code. If that dispensation were changed, it would lead to a radical improvement in the football fortunes of, say, Tipperary and Limerick and the hurling fortunes of, for example, Dublin and Wexford.

The trouble is that even by its own standards the Leinster hurling championship isn't working. Kilkenny have always been the pre-eminent power in the province but competition has kept going through the emergence of different counties to provide serious opposition at different periods of history - Dublin, Wexford and Offaly in that order. The problem now is that there doesn't appear to be any such credible opposition.

Expectations of a competitive final or even an upset were partly based on last year when the difference between the counties was just two points and Wexford could have won. But Kilkenny were still going up the gears and the depressing thing about last weekend was that when they felt threatened they lengthened their stride and ended up cantering home.

Four of the champions' six final wins have been by double-digit margins. That's five years (the first title was more than qualified by Offaly's avenging the Leinster final in the 1998 All-Ireland final) of total domination. And it has been underwritten by 13 of the last 14 provincial minor titles so it's not as if relief is around the corner.

Questions have to be asked of the system. As well as the geographical advantages of playing off hurling championships on a provincial basis, there was the competitive integrity of Munster and Leinster. Now we are left with the most important intercounty activity being organised on the basis of four competitive areas.

One works; one doesn't work at an elite level; one works badly; and the other works not at all.

Reforming the system is a problem. As mentioned, provincial councils do valuable work and need income.

The revenue generated by the provincial championships is therefore important. There is also the argument about tradition, which applies primarily to the Munster championship. But the extent to which its allure would survive unscathed if completely disconnected from the All-Ireland is debatable.

One immediate fix involves Galway being brought into Leinster. An invitation has gone out but indications suggest that the county is lukewarm about the proposal. The very sense of tradition that is accounted one of the strengths of the system rebels against importing counties across provincial boundaries.

It's all very redolent of the 1960s experiment that saw Galway playing in Munster. Former hurling manager Jarlath Cloonan once pointed out that Galway felt no sense of involvement in the province and were accordingly as underwhelmed by the experience as they tended to be overwhelmed on the field while it lasted.

For all that Galway's addition to the province would improve competitiveness, effective reform will require farther-reaching change. Devising new championship structures is a widespread pastime and many blueprints try to incorporate the provincial championships as well as to forge a meaningful link between league and championship.

One of the most significant contributions to the debate came in this year's annual report to GAA congress, Games Overview, by Pat Daly, the Head of Games. He suggests a hurling championship structure based on two groups of five teams, who qualify on the basis of the league campaign.

Although there is an inbuilt mechanism to provide a provincial final for Munster and Leinster the thrust of the idea is that the championship should involve round-robin matches between top teams regardless of province. This would be more equitable in that all teams would play the same number of matches to qualify for the All-Ireland semi-finals.

This needn't be the ultimate solution but it would be an improvement. And as the Games Overview document puts it: "This will involve having an All-Ireland series based on merit, as distinct from trying to accommodate the vagaries of the provincial system. This is not a criticism of the provincial system; it is more a recognition of the fact that that the game can only flourish if all units look at the big picture as distinct from what might be in their best interests or what has worked well in the past." Quite.

smoran@irish-times.ie