A question of eligilbility

This week those nasty men at the IRB have resisted calls for eligibility rules for Pacific Island players to be watered down.

To be fair, it’s pretty clear that you can’t have one set rules for Pacific Islanders and another set of rules for everyone else.

In fact, overall I’d say that eligibility rules need tightening up if anything. The 'one grandparent' rule is utterly ridiculous, for instance, as is the rule only requiring 3 years of residency.

There may, however, be a solution. If a player was always allowed to play for the country of his birth, whether or not he had previously played for a different country, then surely (providing only one “switch” was permitted) that’s the problem more or less solved.

Could it be that easy?