It looked like a quiet Sunday afternoon in the waiting room of Beaumont Hospital yesterday. At 3.20 p.m. 13 people were either waiting to be seen, or waiting for someone to emerge from the A&E ward.
Behind the ward doors, it was a different story. At one stage 15 patients were waiting on chairs in the ward, while 44 were on trolleys. According to the Irish Nurses' Organisation, the ward was designed for 28 trolleys.
Dubliner Ms Linda Doyle was apprehensive as she waited to be seen. When she was last in the A&E ward six weeks ago, she ended up sharing her narrow cubicle with another bed.
On that occasion, she had her appendix removed and sat some of her Leaving Certificate exams in the hospital.
Ms Doyle has a kidney condition and had been in the hospital on many occasions. "I've never seen it this bad," she said. She had been waiting for 2½ hours but said she would usually be seen sooner because of her condition.
"Apparently there is a backlog of eight hours, but the nurse told me it wouldn't really be that long," she said.
She saw one woman close to tears when she was told she could not accompany an elderly woman into the A&E ward, because of the cramped conditions.
One woman from nearby Ayrfield had been waiting for her daughter since 8. 30 a.m. She had rung her doctor at 6.20 p.m. on Saturday, after her daughter complained of bad stomach pains.
The doctor arrived at 12.40 a.m. and told her to go the the A&E department. Her father accompanied her, with her mother following later. At 3.30 p.m. they were still there.
"I'm fed up and starving," said the girl's mother, who did not want to be named. She said one patient in the ward had been sitting on a chair on a drip since Friday night.
"And Bertie spends all that money on the Spike. You know what I would like to do with him? Then he would have to come into Casualty and see what it's really like."
One 79-year-old woman with an ulcer had been in the A&E department since 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. She had been released from the hospital on Friday but her condition had deteriorated again.
On her previous visit, she had waited three days for a bed, her daughter said. "Then she was let out the next day. When she went in this morning, she asked the doctor if she could just have a bed, and he said: 'You'll have to talk to your politician.' That's the truth."
Mr Charles Colpaert from Chicago did not think the Irish situation was worse than the US system.
"I think you have to wait to see a doctor wherever you go," he said. "In Chicago we get a lot of homeless people gumming up the system."
He had been waiting for an hour at that stage. "The staff have been wonderful to me," he said. "They are a little more grouchy in the States, I think."
