Eight of Munster’s senior clubs wrote to Munster CEO Ian Flanagan on Friday demanding the “crisis” with its referees be addressed by an independent mediator.

In a separate development, a Munster referee has told the Sunday Independent he has made a complaint to An Garda Síochána and invoked the Protected Disclosure Act for whistleblowers over his dispute with the Munster Branch.

The senior clubs’ letter follows one from the Munster junior clubs who met remotely last Tuesday. Their letter was addressed to the Branch secretary rather than the CEO, and comes in the wake of 11 junior league matches being postponed last weekend because of the current referee shortage.

For the clubs, all from south Munster, to address the CEO directly is an overt attempt to raise the stakes in a dispute over governance that has run for months and has seen a number of referees refuse to handle games. The letter urges Flanagan to act before any further damage is done to the “Munster rugby brand”.

The effect of the row stretches from the Energia AIL down to the schools/youth game, and compounds a reduction in refereeing numbers, part of which the Munster Branch attributes to Covid. In yesterday’s AIL schedule, for example, two Division 2C games were affected by striking referees: Clonmel versus Midleton and Sunday’s Well against Tullamore.

An IRFU official conceded yesterday that in the event of a referee being injured in a match where club officials, rather than Branch referees, were running the line, the game would have to be abandoned.

Meanwhile, below that level, this was the third weekend running that the vast majority of the Munster Association of Referees (MAR) south referees made themselves unavailable, affecting up to 55 games.

The row stretches back to March when the Branch moved to change the structure of the MAR, which is divided into north and south units. Quickly the process developed into a stand-off on a handful of issues.

“We fully accept the need for a restructure,” a member of MAR south told the Sunday Independent last week. “Some of the committees had over 20 fellas on it, crazy stuff, but the Branch want to take our autonomy away from us altogether.

“They’ve gone about it completely the wrong way and we need an independent voice to listen to both sides and sort it out. It’s the players who are suffering in the meantime and it’s them we feel sorry for.

“Part of the problem is this was all done during Covid and it wasn’t debated properly at all. They see us (MAR) as a sub-committee of the Branch but we’re a club affiliated to the Branch and always have been.”