What may happen is a lot of Irish born cricketers will not play for Ireland in limited overs
Plan might backfire.
How?
The current bunch won't do this, unless they retire from internationals and finish their careers as county pros. Some may opt for this, which wouldnt be the worst thing IMO as we need freshening up anyway, but many wont. Others, mostly talking about Stirling here, are IMO good enough to make a county as overseas anyway. Porterfield is captain so I imagine he's on a decent wage with CI so will be doing fine financially in any case. If the likes of Murtagh retired I wouldnt mind tbh. Murtagh wont last too many more years anyway. Besides these guys have given everything for a Test match, they wont quit now when its actually a possibility.
But no future Irish internationals will do what you suggest. The counties wont take them on in the first place if this change is made, thus they won't even have the chance to. They will develop purely within our own system.
The likes of Joyce, Niall O Brian, Balbirnie, Kevin O Brien have all left county cricket already to play domestically in Ireland. County Cricket was never a permanent stage of our development if we wanted to reach the top, cannot rely on them as their interests are different to ours. Sooner or later our own system had to be developed and thats ongoing. Many of the players who in 2013 or so were county second XI cricketers like McCarter, Chase and so on have also left to play here instead.
Also, this hasn't been confirmed yet. As [MENTION=132373]Convict[/MENTION] pointed out I doubt its even possible to prevent the likes of Stirling, Porterfield, who were born in Derry in NI, from playing considering they are UK citizens. And Ireland and the UK have a Common Travel Area, allowing citizens of both nations to freely live and work in both countries without even needing ID or visas. While Brexit complicates this (and everything here is conjecture until Brexit and its terms are rubberstamped) I doubt either nation wants to see this change, so again if left intact I'd imagine the CTA would apply to cricketers as well, but Im not an expert so I dont know.
Point is we should be expanding our domestic structure anyway. 4 teams at present (3 for ODI and 3 day formats). With our increased funding we should add another side (Leinster easily has enough talent to support two teams without compromising quality), increase the wages of the domestic players, make it a 4 day competition instead of three days. If all the county guys came back it'd dramatically increase the standard which, considering its current level, if they did come back, I'd imagine wouldn't be too far off second division county cricket anyway (if they came back).
Only issue I have with all this is how little funding we're still receiving. For us and AFG to get 40 million while Zimbabwe receive 93 million makes absolutely no sense and in our case in particular due to our high costs and standard of living could make things difficult.
