Last Sunday night, Redemptorist priest Fr Alex Reid and Methodist minister Rev Harold Good were the keynote speakers at the opening of the MacGill Summer School in Donegal.
They spoke about the lessons to be learned from the Northern Ireland peace process in which both played a big part, not least as witnesses to IRA decommissioning.
Fr Reid pointed out that a successful peace process required input from both the female and male elements of the communities involved, and said he had often heard it said that if more women had been involved in Northern Ireland politics they would have had "twice as good a peace in half the time".
With others, I was asked to speak the following morning about the lessons to be learned from the recent election in the Republic. One of these lessons also touched on the need for a greater gender mix.
The recent election was a setback for the advance of women in Irish politics. There are fewer female deputies in the 30th Dáil than there were in the 29th Dáil, and this should act as a wake-up call. Something dramatic needs to be done.
Ireland has languished near the bottom of the league table in terms of female representation in our national parliament. For decades, Scandinavian countries have achieved female parliamentary representation of one-third or more, and most other western European countries have achieved one-fifth. We have never had more than 13 per cent.
Much work has been done by political scientists and specialists of equality and gender studies to identify the reasons behind our low levels of female participation in politics.
Some have attributed it to the fact that Ireland has traditionally been an agrarian and patriarchal society, with low levels of female workforce participation.
In this respect, the 1992 election, where an unprecedented 20 women were elected to the Dáil, was seen as the great breakthrough. Now, however, a decade and a half later, in the post-Celtic Tiger era, where our society has reached Scandinavian-like levels of female workforce participation, little has changed in the gender composition of the Dáil. It cannot be assumed that the passage of time itself will solve this problem.
Of course, we can point to progress in other aspects of politics. It is significant that the presidency has been held by women for the last 17 years, and that Mary Harney held the position of tánaiste for nine years. We have been blessed, in the main, by the calibre of women elected to Dáil Éireann, but there have been too few. The main reason appears to be that the parties, especially the larger parties, are selecting very few female candidates.
An interesting feature of the planning and preparation for the recent election was the increasing centralisation of candidate selection. Headquarters and/or national executive committees have an increasing influence on candidate line-up.
However, even this trend has not led to the improvement in the selection of female candidates which it has led to in other countries such as Britain with similar parliamentary systems and which had similarly low levels of female membership of parliament.
In last May's election only 13 per cent of the Fianna Fáil candidates were female, about a quarter of candidates fielded by the Progressive Democrats and the Green Party were female, and the other parties come in at between 16 and 18 per cent.
We have come to a point where, if we genuinely want to see a transformation in parliamentary representation to reflect more accurately the gender breakdown of the population, we need to take affirmative action.
Each of the political parties should be required to field a quota of female candidates in all future elections. One could initially ask parties to write such quotas into their rulebooks but, if necessary, it should be made a legal requirement or a condition of State funding. A target should be set that in the next election each party should field a candidate line-up to include at least one-third females and one-third males.
Enduring low levels of female participation in politics is a consequence of the way our society, our economy and our politics are organised. It is more difficult for women in Ireland to juggle work and family than in many other western European countries. Managing a "third" job of engaging in community and/or political activity is almost impossible for most of them.
Before the recent election, the independent deputy Mildred Fox cited the pressures of reconciling a political life with being mother to a young family as her main reason for not contesting the 2007 election.
There are many who will argue against positive discrimination - some of the most vociferous opponents of female candidate quotas are women who are already members of the Dáil and see themselves as having done it without the assistance of affirmative action. Others argue that it is up to the electorate to decide who they want as their TD.
I am not arguing that the choice of TD be taken from the electorate, but I am arguing that the electorate be given more women on the tickets from which they are asked to choose. The time has come for female candidate quotas.