Former Green Party senator Dan Boyle has come under fire for a comment he posted on Twitter regarding the arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

After news of Strauss-Kahn's arrest in New York broke over the weekend, Mr Boyle said the “Strauss-Kahn sexual assault allegations are of course of the utmost seriousness, but paying $3,000 for a hotel room isn’t all that far behind”.

His tweet elicited a torrent of messages on Twitter, with many claiming Mr Boyle’s comment was offensive to abuse victims and belittled the seriousness of sexual crime.

One poster said: “Comparing sexual assault to paying exorbitant money to sleep on expensive sheets is trivialising the matter.”

Another said: “Hypocrisy on austerity is annoying, but the tweet implied it's close to sexual assault in seriousness”.

Mr Boyle said he had never meant to trivialise sexual assault and admitted his tweet was poorly phrased. "Of course I believe sexual assault is far more serious, which is what I said," he said.

This is not the first time Mr Boyle has courted controversy via his Twitter page.

It was a tweet from Mr Boyle while part of the Fianna Fáil/Green Party coalition that triggered a sequence of events that led to the resignation of Willie O’Dea from the cabinet in 2010.

In February this year, Mr Boyle drew sharp criticism from the then minister for finance Brian Lenihan after he tweeted Fianna Fáil had been reluctant to deal with rogue bankers while in government.