1. what are you satisfied about? I know a lot of very indifferent members who think it may as well not exist.
2. If the Irish students go caving without authorisation from the university, the university will shut the club down and repossess all equipment bought with university funds. The club would also then have no ability to access funds from either the university or other bodies (in this case Sports Ireland). The same thing effectively happened to SUSS about 20 years ago, they were effective in combating this by ensuring the university was not able to access the equipment, by ensuring other funding was available, by having a strong relationship with other cavers for support in going caving (along with good alumni support) and by telling the university they would keep using the university name in the club name so the university would still be associated with the club by name (not what the uni wants, they want to control what happens in their clubs which they would not have been able to do in this case). Unfortunately the Irish student clubs are not in a position to do this.
Your student days were some decades ago - since that time, universities have changed massively, and are now businesses rather than places to learn in most cases. This is even more the case in Ireland than in the UK, and Ireland has quite a different, more Americanised, approach to liability than the UK does as well.
3. I mean the Republic and Northern Ireland. Administratively in this case student caving clubs from NI and ROI are basically treated the same and the universities from both places are acting together.