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I wonder why that is?

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What worries me about this is if they bring in a quota system. Let's face it, the calibre of many of our female politicians hasn't been up to much.

I suppose the same could be said of our male politicians too, now that I think of it.

Seriously though, whenever I read something like this I think "Mary Harney, Mary Coughlan".

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Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid - Einstein.

I believe it is a side effect of our electoral system. We are the only country in the world - other than Malta, which was placed even lower than Ireland - to use STV for electing our national parliament, although it is used elsewhere for regional elections.

Basically if you are competing against candidates from your own party in the same constituency, what can you use to differentiate yourself? Most candidates from big parties try to carve out local advantage through very time and labour intensive constituency work, which is in quite sharp contrast to candidates elected via list systems, such as those in Scandinavia. This makes it particularly difficult or unattractive for women.

Candidates from smaller parties don't tend to have running mates so are freer to campaign on ideological grounds (Lab, SP, SF etc. PD's in the past).

The few women who are elected to the Dail either represent smaller parties (without running mates) or have ‘inherited’ seats complete with constituency machine intact from a male family member or have either no children or entered politics long after their children were reared.

Of course there are exceptions, but they really are the few exceptions that ultimately prove the rule.

I am very much against quotas for female TDs because it does not tackle the fundamental systemic obstacles to women entering politics. Unless we question why there are so few women in politics and tackle exclusion in response to those problems, anything else is meaningless tokenism.