I think England will struggle to get past us consistently with the current contrast in club / provincial structure. Since 03, I think it's fair to say the only sustained period where England were a better team than Ireland was 2016 - 2020 and that Ireland have been the better of the two more often than not. I think it's also a pretty good time period to use because 04 is when the Irish team started to see some success from their (late) adaptation to the pro game and when England lost their core group of elite players who were at a level the game hadn't seen before due to their early and positive adaptation to the pro game. 04 was a somewhat more level playing field that hadn't really ever existed between the two before given the status of the game here in the 20th century.
That's all to say, that three residency guys aren't why we're better than England and all of them have only worked out as products of a massive advantage Ireland has. The IRFU controls how the provinces, and any Irish representative side play and the primary objective of each of those teams is to churn out international players, club trophies aren't the main indicator of success at that level for the IRFU. There's certain core skills that every province bases their game around, the shapes and formations are different so each side can work optimally within the system but every player is being assessed by the same KPIs and training and gameplans are largely focused on improving the skills related to them. This is also why you see Farrell pluck guys from provincial benches and turn them into first XV internationals while other provincial top performers don't make Ireland squads.
Meanwhile England have somewhere between 8 and 12 prem teams depending on the time of year, all playing to their own strengths with their primary objective being to win the prem and then a European comp, if anything a top performer not playing international rugby is the perfect employee. From the perspective of a club fan, this is far better imo, but I think it limits success for England. Saints, Sarries, Tigers, Quins and Bath are all playing rugby very differntly from each other and providing the core of the international side. There's nothing a coach can do to create a system to suit all the top performers on all of these teams and the initial challenge becomes selecting players from the clubs who are good enough for international rugby and capable of playing whatever way England are going to play, there'll be bad selections here naturally that waste squad exposure and match minutes on unsuitable players. The next step is often morphing players who can play the system into the players they need to be, this takes time and will limit how often England are reaching optimal levels of performance. Take those two issues that are far less of a problem in Ireland, multiply it by about 15+ positions in any given extended England squad, add in that the standard of coach and player which will vary more than Ireland because of the lack of instruction manual, and all of a sudden the numbers advantage that England have looks like a bit of an afterthought.
England either need to gain control over how the clubs play or need a dominant English club, the first won't happen and the second is uncontrollable. So unless the structure below the EPS sees big change, I can only see England remaining a team whose level of play will vary significantly over each 5-10 year period whereas while we might not have the raw talent we saw a lot of success with from 2021-23, we'll generally be getting the very best out of the not massively limited source of talent thay we do have so whatever about the peaks of each team, Ireland's troughs shouldn't be as low.
