Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan has accused Labour leader Ivana Bacik of low political tactics by comparing him to Hungary’s authoritarian outgoing prime minister Viktor Orbán.

“If I was Patricia O’Donovan, a woman, I don’t think she’d have said it. And I think she should reflect on it,” O’Donovan said on Saturday.

O’Donovan was at the centre of controversy this week when he suggested that media coverage of the fuel protests had been “lopsided” and that a formal review may be needed.

His comments promoted Bacik to remark in the Dáil: “Goodbye Viktor Orbán, hello Patrick O’Donovan.”

On Friday, O’Donovan said he “made a hames” of what he was trying to say and should have phrased his comments differently.

Addressing the matter further on Saturday at the launch of the National Archives 1926 census exhibition, he said: “Unfortunately, we live in an age of political pile-on. The difference is when people make mistakes and own it. I explained yesterday the mistake that I made, certainly around the vocabulary that I used.”

O’Donovan said Bacik’s comments “didn’t go down well” with him and his family and he said the Labour leader “knows that I’m not of that kind of persuasion”.

“She might have got a bit of a laugh from the few Labour TDs that she had around her but … in an age of social media pile-ons, and when people have enough of grief in politics, it’s people like that, and it’s commentary like that, that add to it.”

In his initial comments, the Fine Gael minister had told Tipp FM he would be “examining” coverage of the blockades “from a balance point of view”. He suggested there had been insufficient coverage of people who disagreed with protesters’ methods and said RTÉ’s coverage of the blockade at Whitegate fuel refinery, Cork, was “almost like a flare” in drawing attention to it.

The National Union of Journalists described the comments as “sinister and deeply disturbing”, while Tánaiste Simon Harris, the Fine Gael leader, said he believed there was “no need for any sort of formal review”.

Subsequently, O’Donovan said he could have used “a better formula of words”.