Portmarnock Golf Club has had its drinks licence suspended for seven days for excluding women as members.
However, enforcement of the suspension depends on the outcome of High Court proceedings being taken by the club. A date has yet to be set for those proceedings.
Judge Mary Collins imposed the suspension in the Dublin District Court yesterday.
On February 20th the same court agreed with an Equality Authority ruling that the club was in breach of the Equal Status Act, 2000, and was discriminatory. The club is challenging the constitutionality of the Act and appealing the ruling.
If the club is successful in either of its High Court challenges, the licence suspension will not be enforced.
Judge Collins said the lack of a code of practice for private clubs left them "in a position of having to interpret for themselves" the Act. Given this lack of clarity, she was inclined to consider a sanction at the lower end of the scale, she said.
The chief executive of the Equality Authority, Mr Niall Crowley, said he was not disappointed at the sanction, and that its scale was not the issue. "It's the application of the sanction that counts," he said. The seven-day suspension would, he hoped, give the club time to change its policy.
If it failed to address the issue there were further, harsher sanctions, up to and including a full revocation of the club's licence, he said.
He said the case would provide a benchmark for how all clubs should behave, and provide the first body of case law on which the authority could begin to put together a code of practice. It could not do this up until now, he said, because it was not up to the authority to interpret the Act.
