Updated at 22.00

IRFU PERFORMANCE DIRECTOR David Nucifora has a right to be proud of his first year in the job.

Since his contract began on 1 June last year key totems of the international team have been tied down to contracts, players have been moving between provinces with increasing regularity and, today, Ireland’s mythical Sevens programme was made real.

The goal for the mix of amateurs and academy prospects included in the squad is to qualify for the Olympic Games. In theory, that can be achieved this summer with successful progress through three tournaments.

However, Sevens tournaments pose a host of new challenges such as opposition who have more 7s minutes on the clock, testing conditions, soaring temperatures and the unpredictability of a make-or-break series played out over a few hours.

The USA won this weekend's London Sevens event. Adam Davy Adam Davy

Little wonder Nucifora moved to ease some of the weight of expectation as reporters began to make plans for Rio.

“It’s going to be difficult for us. The rest of the countries around the world have had a big head start on us,” the Australian said in the Aviva Stadium today.

“I think that if we can get ourselves in to that European qualifier [in Lisbon] in July that would be a good achievement. Once you’re in there, anything can happen.”

Ireland have had a somewhat chequered existence in the shorter form of the game up until this point. Yet despite Nucifora speaking in glowing terms about benefits the game can bring to players, he kept his pride in the establishment of the structure quiet today; not wishing to publicly flog anyone for ignoring the sport while every other major rugby nation were fully invested.

“You always have to sit back and look at why people do what they do and go about it,” Nucifora says in a gravelly Brisbane accent.

“One of the key drivers for us is, when you’ve got a small playing population relative to your competitors, you have to think of every opportunity you can to make sure you’re creating internal competition.

We need more players ready to play at the professional level quicker than we’re producing them now. Sevens is a way of doing that.

“So we will be developing young players through this game. If those players can go on to become internationals in 15s rugby, we’ll continue in Sevens, that’s fine. But if we’ve got more competition for contracts, then competition creates performance and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Cost was often a quick and easy reason presented to argue against establishing an off-shoot structure for Sevens. Today, Nucifora simply laughed off a query about the outlay he has been permitted, instead pointing to the value the game would provide.

Dan Sheridan / INPHO Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO

“Everyone’s interested in the cost, it must have been an issue in the past,” he said with a broad smile.

“We call it our shoestring programme and we’ve done it by saving money in other areas of the high performance area. I think it’s a good investment.

“It’s not costing a lot of money – it’s a camps-based programme, we don’t have the players in here full time – that’s adequate for what we’re trying to achieve in the next couple of years. We think we can produce players on a minimal investment that’s going to add value to what we already spend in other areas.”

Specifically, that value falls in to two categories for the Australian, player development firstly:

Developing the players we’ve already got in a slightly different way and exposing them to different things – if we keep  doing the same thing we’ll always get what we got, as they say.

“This will enable us to put them in to a game that will ask different questions of them as players. And our ambition is to speed up the development of our players so it creates a different pathway for a different group of players doing a different thing.”

The second benefit is making the game more attractive to newcomers.

Simplistic

“The beauty of Sevens is that it is a more simplistic version of the game.  One of the great thing about 15s rugby is the complexity, but at times it is a challenge for people who aren’t quite across the game.