The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell, has described the Equality Authority as "a ginger group" and said inequality is an incentive in the Irish economy.
The Equality Authority was a "ginger group as well as a statutory body", he said in an interview with the Irish Catholic.
He totally opposed a suggestion from the chief executive of the Equality Authority, Mr Niall Crowley, that a press council would help ensure the media drive an equality-based agenda.
"A dynamic liberal economy like ours," the Minister said, "demands flexibility and inequality in some respects to function." It was such inequality "which provides incentives".
"Driven to a complete extreme, the current rights culture and equality notion would create a feudal society. A society so ordered, static, and where the Government tries to order everything by law, it would become as atrophied as a feudal society.
"The order is imposed from top down and people have to fit into this order, infused by an imposed morality." He did not believe in "the great planned society", Mr McDowell said.
On the Equality Authority's action against Portmarnock Golf Club, for banning women members, he said he did not believe "it was the intention of the Oireachtas at the time of passing equality legislation to outlaw completely single gender or otherwise discriminatory clubs having access to drink licences".
The Equality Authority took a case against Portmarnock Golf Club in Dublin District Court last November, on the basis that the club's men-only policy was discriminatory under the terms of the Equal Status Act 2000.
Portmarnock maintained the club was private and had the power of exclusion, and was not contravening the Act. Last February the court found in the Equality Authority's favour.
Mr McDowell told the Irish Catholic, that "if the Irish Countrywomen's Association facility in Termonfeckin had a drink licence it would not give me a sleepless night".
Speaking to The Irish Times last night, Mr Crowley said Mr McDowell's comments amounted to "soundbites from a bigger position", but "opened up the possibility of a very significant and profound debate on equality in Irish society".
Equality was "not a soundbite issue" but should "be addressed from a thought-out basis", Mr Crowley said.
In the same interview, Mr McDowell said he was "deeply sceptical of State-controlled syllabuses" in schools, and that, when it came to religion in schools, he did not believe it was "an entitlement of the State to impose a syllabus or curriculum".
