There were the usual common ingredients at Dooradoyle on Sunday. A full-blooded affair, Garryowen's biggest crowd in about five years, another Shannon win and . . . no sign of Brian Ashton.

Unfortunately, there's nothing unusual in that at all. Limerick folk in general feel totally alienated at the moment and Shannon folk in particular claim that the Irish coach has never been to one of the champions' AIL games. Even the Garryowen coach, Philip Danaher, maintains that that is "a total indictment of the whole system."

Of course, Ireland's dismal international showings have given the disaffected Limerick rump all the material they want. Walk into any Limerick club bar, as well as a few more besides, and the talk is of too few Irish players or Irish-based players.

The suspicion lurks that Ashton is inherently biased towards the English game he knows best and has made no real attempt to acquaint himself with the Irish game.

Even as a gesture of recognition, it would seem like a good idea to have paid even a token visit to, say, the Shannon-Ballymena game or the Garryowen-Shannon game in the last month.

If Ireland had pulled clear and won handily enough like they should have last Saturday week, there'd be far less grumbling. As in all sports, winning is basically everything.

Which therefore simply brings us to the question: are Ireland's chances of winning better with a predominantly English-based side, and thus is the Allied Dunbar Premiership a more productive visiting place for the Irish coach than the AIB League?

For all the dubious evidence of the recent outings against Italy and Scotland, sadly the answer, most probably, is still yes. Take the Development tour as both the real starting point for Ashton and the acid test of the aforementioned question. The original squad was an even split of 16 domestically based players and 16 English-based players, each having come from their contrasting club scenes. By the end of the tour, the `Test' team that effectively was still standing for the Western Samoan finale featured 10 English-based and five Irish-based players. In each of those five cases, there actually wasn't a cross-channel alternative.

True, several of the English-based players came up well short of the requirements during that tour as well, but even more of the products of the Irish club game fell shorter still. Believe me, as some-one who endured every minute of that tour and saw all five games, that `Test' team was a fair representation of what happened over that five weeks. The products of the Irish club game were less able to cope with the increased intensity and physical contact of the game down under.

There is an underlining current here. Ashton may not be familiarising himself as sufficiently with home-based players as some of us would like, and is relying overtly on flawed reports (witness the representative selections of Stanley McDowell, James Topping and particularly the out-of-form Stephen Bell lately) but the Irish club game is comparatively ill-equipped to provide the stepping stone to international rugby.

As for last weekend, inquiries as to why Ashton had not been present at Dooradoyle were met with a now typical rebuff from the Irish manager. "Why don't you ring him yourself?" Apparently, after two weeks in Ireland, there were pressing domestic reasons for the coach's return to England. Besides which, Ashton clearly identified the putative return to action of Rob Henderson as his and the Irish team's most pressing concern. And that's all that really matters.

In fact, Danaher has some sympathy for Ashton. Significantly, given he himself was a product of the Irish club game and is now coaching one of Ireland's leading clubs, Danaher readily admits that the AIL is not of the requisite standard and that the proposed reduction of the first division from 14 clubs to 12 will not make a huge difference.

Danaher is a proponent of super clubs, i.e. franchises between neighbouring clubs as opposed to amalgamations. "If you put the best of Shannon and Garryowen together, against say the best of the rest of Limerick, then you'd have a much higher standard. And then the Irish coach would have to come and watch the games."

Indeed, Ashton regularly watched the Irish provinces earlier in the season, which were far more beneficial as a lever to international rugby than the AIL.

Danaher believes that about eight super clubs - pooling together the existing scouting network, coaching structures and commercial weight of the clubs - is the only realistic way forward. He contends that you'd need two each in Dublin and Limerick, both to maintain some local rivalries and ensure no one missed the boat, with perhaps two from Ulster (one in Belfast, one from Ballymena and Dungannon or so forth) and another one each from Cork and Connacht.

The former Irish centre maintains that an elite of around four super clubs would be too small, and that going down the route of the four provinces would leave the clubs too cut off. "The clubs know their way around the local schools and junior scenes." With each of them having a share in a super club, it would be in their interests to nurture a player for the said super club while still retaining the player. The existing clubs would retain their identity and autonomy, by playing out an end-of-season national league or Cup competition.

Sadly, such visionary thinking is all too rare, both in the IRFU and amongst the clubs. Remember, after all, that it is the clubs who have been asked repeatedly by the Union to come up with their own formula, and they can't even agree anything between themselves aside from tinkering with the sizes of the divisions in the AIL.

This is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog; of self-interest over-riding the bigger picture and the overall future of Irish rugby, with the international team as the flagship. Underneath the international team, there simply has to be a trimmed down, professional elite.

Then, maybe, it would make some sense for the Irish coach to be in attendance.