Rugby:Ireland captain Paul O'Connell insists the country can feed off the success of the provinces in this year's Heineken Cup throughout the Six Nations campaign.

With three provinces in the quarter-finals of the competition for the first time, O’Connell admits the mood is good in the Limerick training camp this week.

“The provinces winning certainly gives the national team a lift,” said the Munster secondrow. “We’ll have a group of guys coming in from three teams who have been doing things differently yet have been successful.

“You bring in three different types of experience into a squad and that’s a good thing. We’ve been used to winning games away from home and winning pressure games, figuring out ways to get the result. All of that combines and should be good for the Ireland team.

“It certainly puts a spring in your step and you can see the effect the successful campaigns have had on the atmosphere around the squad.

“It’s been good that most of us have been able to move away from that disappointing performances in the World Cup quarter-final against Wales and put a campaign together. It gets that performance out of the system for a lot of us.”

Ireland meet Wales at the Aviva on Sunday week and then travel to Paris to face France in a challenging start to the Six Nations and O’Connell admits they must begin with all guns blazing.

“We can’t afford a slow start against Wales. We won’t be able to start by playing anything other than to the best of our potential,” he said.

“We lost to them in the quarter-final because we didn’t play to our potential and paid the price. We need to put in a big performance. There will be no warm-up going into it, we must produce it from the start.”