The reason IR's are expensive are due to the complexity and depth of the course, quality costs! If you can't afford it then......
..FAA IR's are well and good albeit not as indepth as JAA but some of the procedues often used in the UK aren't even touched in the American IR and vice versa, I know I have both!
That "quality" argument is utter elitish bo110cks. You are presumably a JAA IR instructor or better still a CAA IR examiner.
The trouble is that one reads so much of this crap on pilot forums there is a limit to how much effort one can put into posting corrections all the time. Which is why this trash propagates so easily. Most of it goes unchallenged because the people who actually fly for real can't be bothered to argue anymore, and those with all the bits of gold plated paper but who rarely fly anywhere have all the keyboard time.
The reality is that neither a fresh FAA IR nor a fresh JAA IR is capable of planning an IFR flight from A to B in European airways. There are loads of procedural issues that are not covered. The JAA IR is intended to prepare the person for an airliner RHS and the ops man hands him the whole plan when he step on, and the LHS keen an eye on him. The FAA IR prepares you to fly real IFR yourself, and the rest (how to work out Eurocontrol routings, which website you get the weather from in Europe, etc) you can pick up.
However the biggest b011ocks is the continual slagging off of the IMC Rating. Before the IR, I was flying European airways on the IMCR (with an IR in the RHS to make it legal) at oxygen altitudes and never had the slightest problem. It's FAR easier than hacking around under VFR, begging variously helpful (or not) ATCOs for a transit of "their" private airspace. The RHS was a graduate of the JAA school machine between Bournemouth and Cranfield etc so he knew nothing about IFR/airways flight planning or enroute strategy. I did all the planning and all the flying. On the skills from the IMCR. The only essential bits which didn't get covered by the IMCR training were SIDs and STARs and those are just like approach plates (you have to read dem and do wot it sez on dem).
The biggest enemy of the IMCR is poor pilot currency, not the training. It's been marketed as just another sausage to sell from the PPL sausage machine, and most holders don't use it. An expired IMCR holder will however be no worse a pilot than an expired IR holder and there are plenty of the latter. In fact most instructors who once held an IR have let it lapse.
The other enemy is poor access to suitable IFR aircraft and of course an IR holder has exactly the same problem. Most JAA IR holders are would-be ATPLs and most of them are skint and don't fly because they can't afford to but they have time, which is how they were able to do the frozen ATPL in the first place.
Both IRs are every bit as good as each other for the core skills of instrument flight.
None of this cuts any ice with the old guardians of purity who regard the European IR as the minimum gold standard for sharing airspace with the so-called professionals. The fact that airways flight is actually a piece of cake and a lot easier than hacking around the UK at 2400ft is conveniently forgotten. If somebody was tasked TODAY with developing a syllabus for the essential skills to fly Euro IFR, the result would make all the old puritans revolve in their graves at 2400rpm.