There are a lot academic arguments in favour of quotas, but I come at it from a different perspective as a practitioner and as somebody who has the experience of having to fight to get elected in politics.

There is no doubt that politics is dominated by a somewhat patriarchal system which female politicians have to challenge every day.

I feel that quotas are a superficial answer to what is a very serious problem. My fear would be that women in politics could be branded as token politicians. However, I believe that women must and should be both selected and elected on the basis of merit. In essence, I believe in a meritocracy.

Anybody who thinks women who are elected to the Dáil, Seanad or local authorities were not chosen on their own merits, or who thinks these women might have an easy time, would be sorely mistaken.

There are huge obstacles to women in political parties, such as discrimination, bullying and isolation. All women would have experienced that at some point in time but the solution is not quotas.

I would like to see procedures and practices that are standard, such as anti-discrimination policies, having an effective complaints system, and proper human resources; the kind of best practice you see in every other workplace in the country is completely absent in political parties.

I think also that women lament this old boys' network in politics, and it does exist, but that is not the fault of men. What women lack is a sense of solidarity among themselves.

Often the women who pay lip service to equality and issues such as gender quotas are the very women who do not support or mentor other women in politics and actually view them as a threat.

So instead of decrying the old boys' club, maybe women need to set up their own network for the purpose of mentoring and cultivating more women in politics. There is a lot of academic research and people point to the fact that in other countries quotas have been introduced to increase the number of women politicians.

One of the most common examples pointed to are in Scandinavia, but in fact most of these countries did not legislate for quotas. In most cases, the parties themselves went through huge internal transformation, where they prioritised female representation and the introduction of best practices to make politics more attractive to women.

We live in a democracy, where people can vote for whoever they choose, and we may not always like the outcome, but engineering an orchestrated outcome is not the answer.

Instead, we need to cultivate the conditions that encourage good, talented, competent women to go forward for office, and I am confident that, when that happens, the voters will have no hesitation electing them.

Lucinda Creighton is a Fine Gael TD for Dublin South East