Half of all candidates for election should be women to end "the overwhelmingly male" representation in the Oireachtas, the Democracy Commission has said.
The State, with just 22 women TDs in the Dáil, has the 19th-lowest number of women in politics in the EU.
The gender gap "reveals the limited influence women have in decision-making in Ireland, and, more critically, raises fundamental questions about the state of representative democracy".
The commission's report, Engaging Citizens, funded by the Rowntree Trust, was undertaken to investigate concerns about democracy's ability to be "inclusive, participatory and egalitarian".
Describing voters as disillusioned, disenchanted and disengaged, the commission said an independent election commission should run elections. Despite the public mood, however, "it would be wrong to assume that apathy and a lack of interest lie behind low youth turnout".
Almost half of all under 24-year-olds who did not vote said they had not done so because they were not registered; were away on voting day; or had no polling card.
Some of the problems could be fixed by registering voters automatically using their unique PPS numbers - the ID numbers used by Revenue and Social Welfare. However, compulsory voting should not be introduced, because it is difficult and expensive to enforce and undermines the freedom offered by democracy.
Meanwhile, electronic voting should be introduced - even though the Government's handling of the issue had damaged public confidence up to now. A paper trail must remain for each vote to maintain public confidence, and declarations should be staggered to ensure the excitement on the day the results come in, which is "part of the Irish culture", would not destroyed.
"Despite the bad experience Ireland has had with the first attempts at e-voting it is a system well worth introducing for the benefits it will bring," said the report.
E-voting should enable people to vote not just in polling stations, but also in "supermarkets, post offices, public libraries, or on their personal computers, or mobile phones." Postal voting should also be encouraged, despite voter fraud problems revealed in the UK last year.
People should be allowed to stand for election at 18, and not 21 as now, since they can vote, marry and sit on juries from that age.
Although voters are cynical about politics, politicians are equally lacking hope. "Perhaps the most disturbing outcome is the extent of disillusionment among politicians.
"Voters see - because the media shows them, often quite brutally - that our politicians are full-time professionals but most of them can do very little that directly impacts on the lives of voters.
"They also endure trivialising of their efforts by the media. Much of their power has gone to Brussels, or to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt," commission chairman David Begg said at the launch of the document yesterday.
"It is important still to affirm, however, these difficulties notwithstanding, that politics is a demanding and noble profession. In my opinion anyone who makes it through the gates of Leinster House has achieved a lot," said Mr Begg.
The report says that an independent electoral commission should run elections; run voter education programmes; and handle much of the monitoring of political funding currently carried out by the Standards in Public Office Commission. Controls must be imposed on appointments to State bodies, which now stand at almost 1,000 - up to half of which have been created in the last decade.
The Health Service Executive is responsible for one-third of all State spending, yet "the only formal line of democratic accountability is the Dáil, a legislature which is among the weakest in any western democracy in its capacity to hold the executive to account".
