A member of the Irish Human Rights Commission has said the Minister for Justice, in his speech to the Durban conference, failed to recognise that racism is a problem in Ireland.
In his conference address yesterday on behalf of the commission, Mr Michael Farrell said racism was a "real and present evil" in Irish society, not a theoretical future possibility.
Last weekend Mr O'Donoghue had said Ireland was determined it "would not suffer the curse of racism" and a public awareness campaign would "ensure racism and racist tendencies do not gain a foothold".
Mr Farrell told The Irish Times the Minister's speech "did not acknowledge the existing problem of racism in Irish society" while "some other countries such as Sweden and Switzerland said very strongly they have existing problems of racism."
A survey to be published today by Amnesty International is expected to show disturbingly high levels of racism against ethnic minorities in Ireland.
In his address Mr Farrell said Irish "official attitudes to asylum-seekers were grudging and unwelcome" and official pronouncements that most asylum-seekers were bogus "sent very negative signals to the population as a whole".
Despite recent improvements in official policies, asylum-seekers were still refused the right to work and many had been treated without sensitivity to their customs and culture, he said, while there has been "a very disturbing rise in racist incidents and attacks, verbal and physical".
Mr Farrell said Travellers have been subjected for many generations to "gross discrimination by public authorities and the settled community as a whole".
He said a key part of the commission's work would be in opposing racism and working to "create a culture of rights and build a society that values diversity and difference and sees it as a resource and a source of strength rather than a threat".
He said the commission supported the proposal that all states should adopt national action plans to implement the conference decisions.
Meanwhile, 21 Irish non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at the conference have distanced themselves from some of the language in the final document to emerge from a parallel NGO conference.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, has already said she could not recommend the declaration to conference delegates as she was "distressed and disturbed" by its calls for an end to Israeli "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing".