One man, who is also a consultant in emergency medicine, has said the conditions in Irish hospitals are "inhumane."
Dr Mick Molloy was speaking as 704 patients were admitted to hospital without a bed on Tuesday, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO).
Dr Molloy was one of those waiting on a hospital trolley for three days over the long weekend.
He told Newstalk Breakfast we need to remember these are people, not statistics.
"It was a pretty life-altering diagnosis, so I'm in the middle of recovering from that now," he said.
"I had to spend three days on a trolly in an Emergency Department where the doors never close, the lights don't go off and there's a constant flow of people.
"[It's] not the best way to recover from your illness.
"We see stats and we hear numbers... what we forget is there's individuals and there's people at the bottom of that.
"Our system has not been able to cope for decades with the volume of patients".
'National scandal'
Dr Molloy said he put this down to the failure of successive Health Ministers.
"It is a national scandal put at the feet of all the successive Ministers for Health for the last 20 years that they let this continue," he said
"[They] keep telling us about plans for 50 beds here, 100 beds here.
"We had a plan for 5,000 extra beds in 2002; those never happened and people are glossing over this every day like it doesn't need any attention.
"That is absolutely scandalous".
'Inhumane conditions'
Dr Molloy said there was simply nowhere for him to go in the hospital.
"As somebody who is on the inside - who knows how to ask for help, who knows what buttons to press to try and get yourself moved - there was no place to be moved to," he said.
"Having been moved around the Emergency Department five or six times - to one cubicle, to a different cubicle, to a corridor - I eventually got into a small side room where I could sleep.
"Within an hour of getting into that room, I was informed I was moving to a ward.
"So I was brought up to a new ward, six-bedded ward, lots of people in it, all their relatives there.
"People think they've done you a good thing by moving you from the Emergency Department, but it's actually not always a great thing when all you're looking for is to actually put your head down and sleep.
"It's inhumane conditions that we expect the patients to put up with".
Dr Molloy added that Irish hospitals are practicing "a very successful form of torture, which has been prohibited" in the form of sleep deprivation.
"We are practicing that on a daily basis in the hospitals".
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