Noreen Ryan, who is vying for one of the five seats in Limerick East, said, "Women are getting a raw deal. Only 16% of councillors and 13% of TDs are women and this can change if women use their vote."

She is calling on women across Ireland to come out and vote for female election candidates on Thursday and claims there will be change if women use their vote.

Ironically, she is putting herself forward for election with the party that has the lowest percentage (13.2% or 14 out of 106) of women candidates.

The Green Party and Sinn Fein have the highest percentage (25% each) of female candidates standing in Thursday's election, with 11 out of the 44 Green candidates and 10 out of the 40 Sinn Fein candidates being women.

Dr Yvonne Galligan, director of the centre for the advancement of women in politics at Queens University, has criticised the two biggest parties for their poor attempts to increase their numbers of women candidates.

She told the Sunday Tribune, "In recent times Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have sought to bring more women into politics but they started too late for their efforts to have an effect in this election.

It takes time to foster women's political ambitions, and the groundwork should have been done in the last local elections.

"Both parties need to send out a clear message to potential female candidates that they would welcome women's interest in standing for election.

This means doing more than just saying it, it means putting measures in place that will give women as good a chance of coming through the candidateselection process as men. Overall, the six main parties are running 186 new candidates in this election. Three-quarters of these are men (142) and only a quarter (44) are women. So, there is a clear bias in favour of male candidates."

Leinster House has traditionally been a cold place for women . . . with an increase from 13 to 20 candidates in the 1992 general election marking the most dramatic increase in recent times.

Fifteen years on, the outlook does not look too promising for women's representation in the 30th Dail. Only 80 of the 469 candidates standing in this week's election are women.

In an international study of women's representation in 150 parliaments, Ireland ranked joint 83rd with Barbados.

The country with the highest percentage of women in its parliament was Rwanda, while Estonia (36th), Ethiopia (45th) and Afghanistan (25th) all rank better than Ireland in terms of women's representation.

Voters in five constituencies will not have the option to vote for a female candidate on Thursday as Limerick West, Meath West, Roscommon-South Leitrim, Dublin North East and Cork South West are all male-dominated constituencies.