Declining standards in public life have led to increasing apathy among voters in the Republic, the Fine Gael leader and former Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton, has told an Irish Association conference in Belfast.
Addressing the conference's theme, "New politics - North and South?" Mr Bruton said many people's impression that all politicians stood for the same policies was increasingly keeping them from casting their votes. He called for a "reassertion of the public interest in politics".
"It is my view that in the wake of the shocking revelations in the tribunals a reassertion of the public interest in politics is urgently needed. I believe that can really only be achieved in the Republic by a change of government," Mr Bruton added.
Such a reassertion required new ethics laws, reforms of the houses of the Oireachtas, the public service, the courts, the political parties and the system of public appointments, Mr Bruton said.
"But more than any of those, a reassertion of the public interest requires a change in the values that underlie public discussion about Irish politics."
It was the duty of all politicians to "lead by example" and accept full personal accountability for mistakes, he said. "These are characteristics of behaviour that should be automatically expected of all politicians. They are notably absent at the moment. No Minister in the current Government accepts any accountability for any error, no matter how grave."
It was now time for politicians to "swim against the tide of cynicism and indifference" that characterised public and media attitudes to politics, Mr Bruton said. "I believe we will need a new government to show that politics can really work."
Prof Monica McWilliams, of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, said negotiating the Belfast Agreement had taught her that often it was not the "inflexible" political centre but the "foot soldiers on the extremes" who had moved the political process forward.
People in the Republic had become more "partitionist" in their thinking over the past two decades, based on a "mixture of abhorrence of the violence, concern with issues in the Republic and sheer boredom about the North", Prof McWilliams said.
A "token representation" of Northerners in the Seanad and the National Economic and Social Forum would hardly change that attitude, she added. "Having said that, even this small element of tokenism has not been reciprocated in Northern Ireland."
Prof McWilliams called for a new system of "active citizenship" in which people had a sense of "shared ownership" of the political process to rebuild their faith in both politics and politicians - a concept the Republic might find timely to join in the light of recent controversies, she concluded.