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IRFU performance director David Humphreys.Ben Brady/INPHO

State of the Union

‘I don’t think I’ve seen signs of regression. I think this year is a blip’

The IRFU’s David Humphreys wants to see directors of rugby in schools around the country.

6.55am, 27 Jun 2025

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A YEAR INTO his role as the IRFU’s performance director, David Humphreys still has one clear task at the top of his to-do list.

He wants to help Connacht, Ulster, and Munster close the gap to Leinster.

While Leo Cullen’s side won the URC and reached the Champions Cup semi-finals, it was a tough season for the other provinces.

Munster squeezed into the URC play-offs but lost in the quarter-finals, while Connacht and Ulster finished 13th and 14th in the table, respectively.

Humphreys and the IRFU have taken some action over the past 12 months. A new tweak to the national contracts model will see the provinces contribute 40% of those deals from their provincial budget from the summer of 2026 onwards.

Leinster have the vast majority of so-called ‘central contracts,’ so that will divert around €700,000 combined per season into the other three provinces each season. That money will go specifically towards Munster, Ulster, and Connacht’s pathways to help them produce more homegrown players.

On top of that, Humphreys and the IRFU have ended the men’s sevens programme, meaning another €1.2 million will be redirected into the three provinces and women’s rugby, which is another big priority for the union.

So what exactly will this money be spent on as the IRFU looks to help Munster, Ulster, and Connacht bridge the gap?

A key part of the plan is for the union to place full-time directors of rugby into schools around the three provinces.

More than 10 schools in Leinster have directors of rugby, so Humphreys and the IRFU plan to implement something similar around the island. It remains to be seen exactly where and when this happens, but the hope is that top-class coaching and planning in more schools in Connacht, Ulster, and Munster will have a major long-term impact.

“The biggest challenge we’ve got is that we have one province that is incredibly good at nearly everything,” said Humphreys this week.

“That’s a huge credit to Shane [Nolan, Leinaster’s CEO], Leo [Cullen, Leinster’s head coach], and Guy [Easterby, Leinster’s COO] for the work they’ve done with what you see on the pitch but also how they interact with the IRFU, certainly over the time I’ve been here, they have been great to deal with. So they’ve got a brilliant set-up.

“When I first came in, there was a lot of talk around ‘Leinster are too strong.’ In a high-performance system, a team can never be too strong. Ultimately, the goal is to be the very, very best. They are very close to being in that position.

Humphreys with Leinster head coach Leo Cullen.Nick Elliot / INPHO

Nick Elliot / INPHO / INPHO

“But the challenge that I believe we in the IRFU have, and in my role, is to make the other three more competitive.

“This year has definitely been a transition year. It’s been a transition year because there’s been a turnover in coaches, because two of our provinces [Munster and Ulster] in particular have had massive injury crises across the course of the season, so it’s felt like a lot of things that could go wrong have gone wrong.

“The challenge then becomes how we close that gap in the provinces. We can do it a little bit by recruitment, by being a little bit more flexible in terms of who they can recruit, when they can recruit, but that’s a short-term solution.

“To me, we’ve got to go, ‘What is the longer-term solution?’ I fundamentally believe, based on my experience, what we’ve seen working through the Irish system is that if we can support players below what is traditionally considered the pathway, going into the schools system and putting directors of rugby in there or supporting schools in a way they feel is necessary to improve their rugby programme, we can get a longer-term fix which will ultimately improve the provinces and ultimately support Ireland.

“How are we going to do that? Well, that was part of the decision to finish the men’s sevens programme. It wasn’t simply a financial decision. It was a performance decision based on, we have to be able to reallocate the resources in our system.

“The budgets are not being cut. Kevin Potts [CEO of the IRFU] has said we can’t continue to keep doing what we’ve always done. So what that has meant is we’ve made a performance decision based on the financial reality of the world that rugby is in, not just the IRFU but the wider world, to say we’re going to take a longer-term solution which is the money we’re going to save from finishing the men’s sevens programme is going entirely into investing in the three provincial pathways and the women’s game.”

While improving schools programmes across the three provinces appears to be the first objective, the IRFU also hopes to help clubs make progress. Humphreys mentioned the potential for club sides to compete in schools competitions as he stressed that the pathways in Munster, Ulster, and Connacht can’t simply mimic what is working in Leinster.

Between cutting the men’s sevens programme and remodelling the national contracting system, the IRFU can redistribute close to €2 million per season, which could have a notable long-term impact.

But this is the thing. Making changes to a player development pathway can take years to have an effect at the top of the chain.

Ireland won a Triple Crown this season, but it wasn’t a vintage campaign for the national team. Three of the provinces struggled. The Ireland U20s were poor in their Six Nations campaign.

The concern in some quarters is that Irish rugby is in regression already. Humphreys doesn’t agree.

Humphreys with Andy Farrell and Simon Easterby.Dan Sheridan / INPHO

Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO

“I don’t think I’ve seen signs of regression,” he said. “I think the nature of sport is that there are ups and downs and it’s almost this year there’s been, not quite the perfect storm, but there’s a lot of things that have happened which would give off the view that it hasn’t been as successful as it has been in the past.

“But for all those areas that you mentioned, when you look at some of the changes we’ve made, whether its coaching team, from a contracting point of view, the quality of the squads, I have no doubt that next year will be much stronger and much better, certainly across the provinces.

“We’ve had players who’ve been unbelievably successful, two or three of them probably had a dip in form at the same time. Even after the Six Nations, the form that a lot of them produced towards the end of the season was much stronger.

“The good thing is that this tour will give some of our young players the opportunity to perform and play against a very good Georgian team and we’ll get a sense of where they are.”

Paul O’Connell will lead the Ireland tour to Georgia next week before they head on to Lisbon to face Portugal.

They will be without head coach Andy Farrell and four of his Ireland assistants, as well as 16 Irish players, and many backroom staff.

Two years out from the 2027 World Cup, this seems like an important window of development for the Ireland squad, yet they will be without the bulk of the coaching staff. Humphrey believes that Irish players will only benefit in the long run from Farrell, Simon Easterby, John Fogarty, Andrew Goodman, Johnny Sexton, and Gary Keegan being with the Lions.

“In the same way that we encourage our players to be aspirational and they all want to play at the very highest level, the British and Irish Lions, we want coaches coming in here who’re pushing the boundaries, who are given the opportunity to show how good they are and also improve in their coaching,” said Humphreys.

“And I’ve no doubt that the opportunities that those coaches will have and the experience they will have over the next few months with Andy and the Lions will make them better coaches and ultimately improve Ireland.

“I also firmly believe we’ve a very good group of coaches throughout the Irish system at the minute and from a longer-term point of view, this will give the coaches who are going with Paul O’Connell on the Irish tour an opportunity for them to be better in what they do and take that back to the provinces and that will ultimately make our players better.”

The Ireland U20s side has been a pivotal stepping stone for many of Ireland’s leading players. That age-grade side has enjoyed huge success in recent years under former head coaches Noel McNamara and Richie Murphy, but they finished last in this year’s Six Nations after one win in five games.

Things have not gone well for Neil Doak’s side, but Humphreys is not overly concerned.

“There’s a huge expectation because of the success that Irish U20s have had but Peter Smyth [the IRFU’s head of elite player development] was reminding me of 2018 where Ireland had Caelan Doris, Tommy O’Brien, James Hume, Michael Lowry [but won two games in the Six Nations and finished 11th at the World Championship]. There were a number of players who’ve gone on to be very successful.

Humphreys at the IRFU’s training base this week.Ben Brady / INPHO

Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO

“It isn’t necessarily an indicator that players won’t come through. They’ve been very unfortunate in terms of injuries. If you look at the stats from the Six Nations, a lot of the stats put Ireland in the top two or three but what they couldn’t compete with was that they lost Niall Smyth, Alex Usanov, Alan Spicer [two props and a second row] – the size, the power.

“And because we have a smaller group of players [compared to] a lot of our competitors, when we lose two or three key players out of that, we lose just a little bit of our competitiveness.

“It has been frustrating, I know how frustrated the players and coaches have been and I know how much they see the next few weeks in Italy [for the World Rugby U20 Championship] as a challenge but also an opportunity to show what they have.”

While Humphreys is clearly concerned about Munster, Ulster, and Connacht not allowing the gap to Leinster to become even wider, he insisted he is not downbeat about the state of play in Irish rugby.

With Stuart Lancaster coming into Connacht, Clayton McMillan arriving in Munster, and Richie Murphy guiding Ulster’s young players, Humphreys is confident that fortunes will be quickly reversed around the island.

“I think this year is a blip for a number of reasons that were around changes in coaching teams, player injuries,” he said.

“I think with our recruitment, we’re going to have stronger squads next year. With the coaches we’ve brought in, we’re going to have strong coaching teams next year. That’s going to allow us to close the gap.

“How long will that take? I don’t know. But, ultimately, if Leinster keep pushing the boundaries but the other provinces keep working towards closing it, we’re going to have a stronger national team and stronger provinces.

“The timeline is almost irrelevant, the challenge is to make sure we are closing the gamp, and from an IRFU perspective that we’re making the decisions which are right, to ensure that yes, the challenge is on the provinces to do what they need to do, but the challenge is on us as the governing body to make sure that we’re supporting them to close that gap.

“The expectation in Ireland now is that we have four provinces that are competitive and an Irish team is on top of the world.”

Murray Kinsella

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