The 15 per cent pay gap between men and women is to be one of the key issues highlighted by the Equality Authority this year as it marks the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All.
The average hourly wage for women is still 85 per cent of the male wage, 30 years after gender equality legislation was introduced here.
Niall Crowley, chief executive of the Equality Authority, said that while Ireland had made great progress in certain areas, it was lagging behind many EU countries in taking measures to actively ensure that discrimination did not happen.
"The gender pay gap is remarkably high and it is remarkably persistent," he said. "Huge gender inequalities still persist, like the 15 per cent pay gap but also the absence of women from senior management, the absence of women from political positions and the absence of women in the judiciary."
According to the Central Statistics Office, just 14 per cent of TDs in the Dáil are female while 20 per cent of regional and local authority members are women.
Mr Crowley said he hoped the European Year would create "a new momentum behind equality and equality issues".
The European Year will be launched in Berlin at the end of this month while the Equality Authority will unveil its plans for the year in early February.
The Equality Authority also plans to highlight the 40 per cent level of employment among people with disabilities compared with 70 per cent of other adults of working age.
He said transsexual people were also being discriminated against in terms of health services.
"It's a question of having a treatment path so you can have access to a GP who knows about the condition, you can have access to psychologists who know about the condition and you have a referral path for people through a system rather than the current hit-or-miss system."
Mr Crowley said the Health Service Executive had shown a positive interest in the issue "and hopefully the Health Service Executive will move to take steps to address that".
He also predicted that complaints about ageism would come to the fore this year. Last year's statistics for complaints made under the Employment Equality Acts are not yet available, but Mr Crowley said he expected to see a substantial rise in the number of complaints of ageism in the workplace.
Access to employment, training and promotional opportunities, and discrimination in redundancy packages, are among the key complaints being made by older people.
"That's something we would have been concerned with for a while. Certainly the case files are showing that it is a significant phenomenon and there is a growing focus in the case files."
In 2005, race was the largest category of Equality Authority case files under the Employment Equality Acts, followed by gender, disability and age.
Mr Crowley said Irish society was only beginning to acknowledge its diversity, "but we have quite a step to go to actually value that and see it as something important for society".
