Hallelulah, praise be the lord. As Welsh and English rugby tears itself apart - the former only cobbling together the make-up of its Premier Division scarcely a week before this Saturday's kick-off, while the latter cannot agree on a fixture list for a season that starts a week later - Irish and Scottish rugby trundles along serenely by comparison. Can it really be so?

Thus, it's appropriate that the Irish provinces and Scottish super districts come together this weekend - Ulster and Munster host Glasgow Caledonians and Edinburgh Reivers. Each Union had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a professional mind-set. But, better two years late than never, both have signed up the nucleus of their representative talents to elite, professional squads. How the WRU and the RFU must envy them.

Of course it should have been two years ago, and if not, then last year. This and other columns have long since argued for it; so, pertinently, did the four provincial coaches and the players. Performances in Europe might have benefited too.

But for the English and Welsh unions, it is now two years too late. The horse has bolted. The clubs have, more or less, ownership of the players, and having been unable to afford their own extravagances, now want ownership of the game, lock, stock and barrel.

There is still a clutch of leading Irish and Scots contracted to English clubs, and as long as vainglorious English club-owners continue to offer financial inducements that cannot be sustained by its own club game, then that will always be the case.

However, at last, the Irish Union have given all its players, bar an elite corps, something substantive in comparison. And not only is that by way of hard cash, but also through four fully professional structures and, insofar as is possible, a fixture list which justifies the outlay.

The result, even at these fledgling stages of the Guinness Interpros, is what Harry Williams described on Saturday, even in the aftermath of Ulster's defeat to Connacht, as "the best interpros in living memory".

The reasons are threefold, and he and his Ulster players had just experienced all three of them in Galway: four real teams as opposed to three at most, with another making up the numbers; the advent of a home and away fixture itinerary; and a Super-12 styled points scoring system.

They may not ultimately win this year's championship, but now, at last, Connacht are no longer there to make up the numbers. On Saturday they won a game that in many ways they shouldn't have and without playing well, primarily because last season's European Conference run has revitalised them.

They now have a base standard below which they do not dip. They are hard to score against, hard to beat and have learnt how to hang in where before they may have capitulated - witness the narrow home victories over Nice and Begles/Bordeaux last season.

Thanks to the good husbandry of the last two years under Warren Gatland, and continued by the shrewd Glenn Ross, their fitness levels are on a par with the other provinces.

That's probably a first, so too is the fact that they are truly a Connacht-based team, with real strength in depth.

Not so long ago, the loss of a player such as Junior Charlie, on top of Conor McGuinness, would have done for them. Instead, John Casserley came in for his intepro debut and then, when that didn't work, Ian Dillon came in at halftime as third-choice flanker for his interpro debut and helped transform the game.

Meantime, there is another batch of players straining at the leash - witness the unprecedented 79-point haul and back to back wins of their A side over their Munster and Ulster counterparts. Connacht, we can truly say at last, have arrived.

All of which partly exposes the flaws in the Scots' dual Super District system. By opting for two rather than four elite teams, it seems to me that they've narrowed their options a little too much. For starters, it deprives them of a meaningful, six-match domestic competition and makes them more dependant on others for fixtures.

Furthermore, by only having two instead of four professional squads, they are exposing half the number of players to representative rugby. What chance they of exposing the likes of Pat Duignan, as Connacht did again on Saturday? Or, as the Leinster A side did, the likes of 18-year-old full-back Gordon D'Arcy and 19-year-old centre Barry O'Driscoll, (a raw but big-hitting and potent, tree-trunked straight-runner with, as the watching Michael Bradley observed, a hard-to-stop low sense of gravity)? Or several other examples? Methinks far less.

The interpros still ain't perfect. There should be some club fare as a stepping stone. But as long as things are largely dictated by a flawed European structure, Irish rugby's options are limited in this regard. And despite the lack of preparatory matches, (Connacht and Leinster suffered in week one) the quality of rugby is discernibly up on even a year ago.

This must in part be the result of the more interesting scoring system. The evidence so far? The same four games last year yielded 12 tries; the four games over the last two weekends have produced 17 tries. The even-handed results have helped add to the intrigue, so keeping everyone well in sight of the title and the coveted top two places. Best of all, the intrigue and the rugby should improve even further with the additional three rounds. Heretofore, the four provinces would now be embarking on a final day more akin to Russian roulette, with the title or a top-two place coming down to no more than a last-minute kick.

Now there can be far fewer arguments about the best team winning the title. Nor would one be putting the mortgage on who that would be, much less the top two. And a top-two place could have more repercussions than ever before. Not alone might it decide Ireland's two entrants in next year's European Cup, but it might instead, or also, decide the two entrants in a putative British, British and Irish, or European League.

For the reasons outlined above, when comparing the Scots' two super districts, Ireland needs to maintain four professional squads playing regular representative rugby. This means putting forward a persuasive case for, say, two teams in a first division of a British League, and two in a second division.

After the opening two rounds of the European competitions, the provinces return to an interpro series which is, arguably, even more important for them. The stakes are high, potentially higher than they've ever been. Imagine, an interesting interpro series at last.

Nothing is sacred anymore.