The thing I worry about with giving them test status is how they'll actually hold up in the longer format. Taking Ireland as an example, only a very few of their players can get regularly in county FC teams, that's not the best of signs overall.
I agree the road will be hard. Just look at Bangladesh, for a long period there was talk of stripping them of their test status because they kept getting walloped. They won their first test in their 35th attempt. In the attempts before that had three draws and 31 defeats. In their first 50 tests they had 1 win 5 draws and 44 defeats. Of the 93 tests they have played, they have won just 7 of them, 10 draws (3 of the most recent ones were rain wash outs), and lost 76. However after a generation they are finally able to compete in ODIs and T20s. This improvement would not have been possible without them having test status and being a serious cricketing side.
Take Kenya for instance. They emerged as the surprise package in the 90s, played multiple successive world cups, and even got to the Semi-Finals of the 2003 World Cup. Can you imagine how big an achievement that is for a non-test side. Yet they were not given test status, largely because the B'desh move was working out terribly and they were getting walloped every where, and ICC was getting criticised for having granted B'desh test status too early. Anyway the Kenyan cricket movement after that generation of Maurice Oudoumbe and Steve Tikolo and co., in the absence of test status, just petered away. Where is Kenya now on the cricketing map.
These are now two clear case studies, and one shows that with the presence of test status, one country was able to produce cricketers who could compete a generation later, while the latter shows that a country which as an associate nation was able to get to the Semi-Finals of a World Cup, in the absence of test cricket, has failed to produce the next gen of cricketers, and has just disappeared from the cricketing map.
The idea of granting Afghanistan and Ireland, test status is not about the short term. Yes there will be a decade or so them not competing and being the whipping boys. However the benefit will come a generation later, when they will have produced cricketers able to compete with the best. We already have the Kenya example, and I would hate for Ireland and Afghanitan to go down the Kenya route because of the absence of test status. Giving Ireland and Afghanistan test status now, will secure their cricketing future, or they too will fail to produce and inspire the next generation of cricketers and disappear like Kenya.
