The IRFU may be looking for ways to cut costs, but it has still booked 88 rooms for three nights in a five-star hotel in Rome for next month's Italy-Ireland rugby match.
Some will be occupied by players and the team management, but the majority are for others, including the 22 members of the IRFU committee. The committee is due to vote at a special meeting in Lansdowne Road next Thursday on whether to disband Connacht as a professional entity in order to save money.
The IRFU has booked 88 rooms in the Westin Excelsior Hotel on the fashionable Via Veneto in Rome.
Although the Irish team will also be staying there, the cost of the trip, excluding the playing squad and management, is likely to be in excess of €100,000 and possibly as much as €140,000. The hotel has confirmed that even group rates would not dip below €325 for a double room or €270 for a single room.
An IRFU spokesman last night maintained that it is actively reducing costs incurred by union-funded official travelling parties to away games in the Six Nations championship.
He also said that committee members' partners would have to pay their own costs, though one committee member contacted by this newspaper disputed this yesterday.
The IRFU's annual accounts do not specify committee expenditure on travel for official parties. The union spokesman could not confirm or deny the projected cost of the trip, or the numbers travelling.
The Westin Excelsior is a luxurious five-star hotel and is described accordingly in the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide to Rome: "Exotically sculptured balconies supported by statues set the tone for this extravagant hotel, which houses boutiques, saunas, a restaurant and a famous piano bar."
The guide adds: "Public rooms are sumptuous with marble walls and floors, rich carpets and brocade furnishings, and the corridors are panelled with silk or imitation marble. The bedrooms are elegant and spacious, with chandeliers, painted and gilded wooden panelling, and ornate, marble bathrooms."
The expenditure is likely to further anger rugby supporters in the west. The hastily formed Friends of Connacht have hired a train from Galway on Thursday to supplement a planned march by at least 1,000 supporters from Baggot Street to Lansdowne Road in advance of the committee meeting.
That meeting has, unusually, been moved - from the Berkeley Court Hotel, where the union conducts its meetings, post-match banquets and other activities - to the committee room under the West Stand in Lansdowne Road.
The Irish Rugby Union Players' Association chairman, Mr Liam Toland, has strongly indicated that its 120 members will take strike action if the union presses ahead with the proposal to reduce playing numbers by 25 per cent.
