The wins secured by Bohemians and Shelbourne over the weekend might have been tight but there was nothing in the games, or in the way the two sides have performed in Europe in recent weeks, to undermine the widespread feeling last year's top two are set to make the championship running this year.

The pair have invested heavily in establishing their dominance, putting together full-time squads with full-time managers and have taken a lead that the league has long lacked as one sub-committee after another produced reports, more often than not ignored, on how the game here was going to be moved forward.

If the pundits do turn out to be right, however, and Dublin's two biggest clubs successfully spend their way to first and second in this year's title race then the final league table next March will provide further evidence of the increasingly damaging dominance of the capital in what badly needs to be a national league in reality as well as name.

In truth, it has almost always been so. The first 11 championships after the establishment of a separate league in the south produced Dublin winners, the first nine were dominated by last season's top two plus Shamrock Rovers while four involved Bohemians and their now northside neighbours wrapping up first and second between them.

A handful of clubs, Cork United, Waterford and, over a more sustained period, Dundalk, have successfully challenged the dominance of the various Dublin outfits for spells since, but over the entire history of our league it is only during the 1970s that there was really a healthy geographical spread to the end of season title races.

During the 11 seasons between 1970 and '81, eight clubs from seven cities and towns won the League of Ireland title. Between 80 and '91 Rovers won four league titles and St Patrick's Athletic one. But a couple apiece for Dundalk and Athlone, one-off victories for Limerick United and Derry City as well as runners up spots for Drogheda United and Galway United did at least tend to maintain the sense that the power base within the league was becoming less centralised. Sadly, the last few seasons have tended to undermine that argument.

While Dundalk, Cork and Derry all started the 1990s well, and ended up winning four titles during the 11-season period that ended at the start of this summer, the growing financial power of the big Dublin clubs has more recently suggested that it is they who are pulling away as a group.

On the face of it, having four clubs from the top flight in one location when so much of the country is almost entirely untouched by senior football looks crazy, but throw in UCD and Bray, one a Dublin club enjoying very limited support amongst its surrounding population, the other a Wicklow outfit whose real potential lies in the town's dramatic growth as a suburb of the capital and we're up to half of our top-flight sides.

And it may be about to get worse. Dublin City, renamed as part of a highly ambitious plan to establish itself as another major force in the game, has spent heavily in an attempt to win promotion in this, the most difficult of seasons.

If the club succeeds and UCD (they look the most likely candidates) don't go down then the number of derby matches next season is going to reach quite laughable proportions with potentially seven of 10 top-flight sides coming from the capital and its greater metropolitan area.

Even without the planned reduction in size of the top-flight, the idea of having so many Dublin clubs involved would have been alarming but as it is the league is in danger of being seeing in vast areas of the country as being wholly irrelevant.

Another problem is the fact that the increased government funding coming on stream at the moment has finally presented clubs with the opportunity to develop decent facilities for players and spectators. The incentive to do so would be considerably greater if they had a realistic opportunity of playing football with the best teams in the country.

Only by doing so can the standard improve and the league as a whole start to progress again towards being a genuinely national organisation.

It's late in the day, (and I know I've been hard on the league for some of the spectacular u-turns it has made in the past) but, even now, the plan to reduce the size of the premier division should be scrapped and the number of teams going down automatically reduced from three to one.

Either that or we are in danger of introducing one of the Irish game's other great talking points of recent years - a regional first division - by accident.

Our own variant of the great European model will be comprised of one division and involve clubs from everywhere bar Dublin.

Kind of sets the pulse racing, doesn't it?