Adding Paul O'Connell to the Ireland coaching ticket was "the right thing to do" insists Simon Easterby, who had to give up one of his two roles to accommodate his former Test colleague.
O'Connell's arrival ahead of this year's Six Nations saw him take over as the new forwards coach in place of Easterby, who retains his role as defence coach.
“I found it an easy transition, to be honest," said Easterby, who first came on board with Ireland under Joe Schmidt as John Plumtree's replacement in 2014.
"We’ve obviously got a brilliant operator in Paulie coming in and taking the lead at the lineout.
"It wasn’t a hard thing to do, we had plenty of conversations prior to coming into camp around lineout, what we needed to improve on, what our strengths were, what our weaknesses were both as a unit and individually."
O'Connell seemed to have an instant impact with an improvement in Ireland's play at the line-out and also at the breakdown in the 21-16 defeat to Wales last Sunday, when the visitors were reduced to 14 men after just 13 minutes when Peter O'Mahony was red carded and, 10 minutes later, James Ryan left the fray with a head injury.
"I think that transition was good," said Easterby. "We had disruption in the game with Pete and James (Ryan) going off early but I thought we adapted pretty well to that.
"Listen, it’s what I think was the right thing to do and I know the players are benefiting from Paulie’s experience and his detail and I think we’ll start to see that - we already did at the weekend - but we’ll see that in the next few weeks."
Easterby took on the defence role when Farrell succeeded Schmidt after the World Cup. Asked if the extra responsibility made his job tougher, he replied: "No, it was what I was asked to do.
"I guess we had a few changes last season, a couple of more senior players leaving the group through 2020, a few new guys coming in, we gave 11 or 12 debuts, Quite a few of those were in the forward pack.
"That transition was always going to cause a few teething problems. I think it was the right thing, I had plenty of support from all areas from Fogs (scrum coach John Fogarty) in the lineout and Faz, Catty (attack coach Mike Catt) and Richie (kicking coach Richie Murphy) in the defence.
"But for me it was certainly the right thing to do, something that was spoken about for a while and not necessarily a response or reaction to what we did during the autumn".
