Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn insisted Labour leader Eamon Gilmore had a difficult task in choosing the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform.
Mr Quinn defended the surprise decision to give Brendan Howlin the job rather than Joan Burton, who was widely tipped to get a senior finance portfolio. Instead, Taoiseach Enda Kenny named her as Minister for Social Protection.
There was some shock at Ms Burton's exclusion last night, with one Labour colleague, speaking on the basis of anonymity, suggesting that there may be sexism at play.
But Mr Quinn said this morning that nobody was guaranteed a seat at the Cabinet table. "Brendan Howlin has been a full Cabinet Minister in two separate governments. The main job in the post he's been appointed to is getting reform and finding efficiencies and economies and he is very well equipped to do that," he said.
"Joan Burton has got the biggest spending department in the Government. She is responsible for placement and employment services and she is very well equipped in that area," he told RTÉ's Today Pat Kenny programme.
He described the job of choosing between two able people for a position as "being the loneliest task a leader had to do". Mr Quinn said Fine Gael, with the greater number of seats in the Dáil, had "successfully laid claim" to the finance portfolio, which went to Michael Noonan.
Earlier, Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport Leo Varadkar dismissed suggestions that the new Government had marginalised women by only appointing two to Cabinet.
Mr Varadkar said the dearth of females was partly due to there being not enough women in politics.
“There are three women in Cabinet if you include the Attorney General. She is not formally member of Cabinet but is as good as. She is also the first female attorney general. Joan Burton is heading the largest spending department in Government,” he said. “If there are only three women in Cabinet it’s because we don’t have enough women in politics.”
Mr Varadkar also disagreed with criticism that the Cabinet was too old, making it hard for it to empathise with young people in negative equity and struggling to pay bills.
"It's important to have a Cabinet that has empathy with all ages. There are three of us in our 30s – me, Simon Coveney, Paul Kehoe. We'll bring the empathy, the others will bring the experience," he told RTÉ's Morning Ireland.
Responding to criticism from Fianna Fáil over the splitting of responsibility in the Department of Finance, Mr Varadkar said there had been one minister dealing with revenue and expenditure for the last ten years and “that didn’t work out so well”.
He rejected suggestions from Independent TDs yesterday that the new Government was “simply picking up where the last Government left off”.
He said the new Government would do a lot of things differently but agreed there would be “more of the same” with regard to austerity measures.
Mr Varadkar said the priorities for his Department would be the abolition of the travel tax, the reform of some labour agreements to make tourism more competitive and to have integrated ticketing within a year.