RTE said yesterday the lack of adequate advance notice was one of the reasons they will not be covering the European Cup meeting at Santry at the weekend.

It means that BLE has been forced to pay a German television production company £45,000 to fulfil its obligation to the European Athletics Association to provide live television coverage of the meeting to any country wishing to take it.

Finland has taken up that option while several others have expressed an interest in a package of edited highlights to be shown later in the day.

"Under an agreement between the European Broadcasting Union and the European Athletics Association, a country cannot agree to stage an event such as this until agreement on coverage has been reached with the host broadcasting service," said Tim O'Connor, RTE's head of sport.

"In this instance, we knew nothing of BLE's intentions until they had tendered successfully to stage, the European Cup fixture and we were, in fact, presented with a fait accompli.

"Even with due notice this would have been a substantial undertaking by RTE, involving the use of three outside broadcasting units. In the situation in which we found ourselves, it was an impossible one.

"On Sunday we are contracted to cover the doubledecker GAA programme at Croke Park in addition to the CorkClare game. This, of course, has since been exacerbated by the demands of the general election coverage and it has placed us in a situation in which we have had to hire in equipment to cope."

But BLE official Nick Davis has rejected the implied criticism that BLE was slow in informing the broadcasting authorities of their plans to present Dublin's biggest athletics programme in years.

"We weren't certain that we were being awarded the meeting until last November and negotiations with RTE followed very shortly after that," said Davis.

"In the past, we were told that our meetings weren't sufficiently attractive to carry major television programmes. Now, when we have some of the leading athletes in the world competing in Dublin, we discover that RTE is not interested.

"Because of the extra expenditure in bringing in a German production company, the cost of presenting the meeting is now dose to £200,000. And with no meeting sponsor - a product of the lack of television exposure - that is a huge bill for our organisation."

Theoretically, RTE could still show highlights of the meeting free of charge, courtesy of the EBU package, but at present there are no plans to do so.