One group says maternity leave options for politicians are still not where they should be.
It comes as Justice Helen McEntee has revealed she is pregnant with her second child.
Minister McEntee made history last year as the first ever sitting Cabinet minister to take maternity leave.
However the arrangements highlighted the lack of legal provision to allow politicians to take leave after having a baby.
Caitríona Gleeson, CEO of Women for Election, told Newstalk Breakfast things are moving slowly.
"Things are in progress, but they're not where we'd like them to be yet.
"It's wonderful to here Minister McEntee's news - but with Women for Election we'd love to be in a place where this isn't news, that this is just ordinary day-to-day politics.
"That a politician takes maternity leave, or takes paternity leave, as a normal course of events".
She says politics generally wasn't designed with women in mind.
"The tricky piece is we didn't design politics for women to be included when we established our Constitution.
"So we have some cultural issues, in terms of not having taken care of this in the last hundred years.
"But we also have very practical measures that could be put in place quite rapidly, such as formal pairing arrangements.
"At the minute there isn't formal pairing arrangements.
"When Minister McEntee took her maternity leave, she was reliant on the goodwill of somebody in the opposition to volunteer to go into a pairing arrangement for the full maternity leave.
"That actually involved another woman standing out of the Dáil.
"So what we're hoping to see fairly rapidly is that there will be formal pairing arrangements."
But she believes a referendum is what is needed.
"What we don't have, and what we need, is a constitutional referendum... to allow for women and men who are on maternity or paternity leave to actually have the option to vote or participate in Oireachtas business if they choose to".
