The president of the Labour Party, Mr Michael D. Higgins, has accused the Progressive Democrat president and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell, of espousing "a radical individualism that distorts the role of the State".
Mr Higgins was responding to comments by Mr McDowell in an interview with the Irish Catholic, where he spoke of the necessity for inequality as an incentive in the economy.
The Minister also said that "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."
Mr Higgins said the Minister was making a case for "individual freedoms at the expense of basic social rights. It is hard to see how community could survive with such extreme views." They represented a recommendation of greed "which many of us have known to be the PD philosophy for some time", he said.
The Minister "distrusted the role of the State even when it was following an egalitarian agenda", while "those of us from the egalitarian tradition have never argued for sameness", he said.
He dismissed the Minister's suggestion in the same interview that changes in moral attitudes, rather than economic necessity, meant couples went to work and had fewer children.
"He ignores the facts when it comes to the cost of housing. The reality is that both partners have to work to sustain their mortgage," he said.
He remarked how, on canvasses, it was now noticeable that there were so few children on many estates, and how many people in their 30s were still living with their parents because they cannot leave home. The Minister was saying such things should be accepted as incentives to the economy, when in fact they were "a badge of failure".
They were "a sign that society is losing its capacity for community".
"Figures showed that 30 per cent of new households would not be able to provide a home from their own resources in the next five to 10 years," he said. "The figure was as high as 50 per cent for Dublin and 54 per cent for Galway city. How moral is it to assert a freedom to exploit the need for housing to a point at which we have these results?"
Mr Higgins said the Minister was arguing for further freedoms for those who already had the privileges and the resources to continue to exploit them, he said.
As regards the Minister being "totally opposed" to Mr Niall Crowley's (chief executive of the Equality Authority) idea that the media drive an equality-based agenda, Mr Higgins, while reserved on interference with the media, asked whether the celebration of million-euro houses and endless coverage of a celebrity class were the Minister's idea of incentives. They would not be seen as such in a civilised society but as reflective of what is gross and demeaning, he said.