The mayor of Galway led several hundred protesters through the city streets at the weekend to highlight the continued closure of Galway Hospice.
"This is the scandal of 2003 here in Galway," Cllr Terry O'Flaherty (PD) said at the march. "The Western Health Board should never have let it come to this . . . If this was a private company, this would not happen."
The protest was organised by Glór, a community-based voluntary group in Connemara which has been established to voice the concerns of patients and families. The 12-bed hospice has been closed to all referrals of new patients since last May, although the home care and day care services have continued.
A review of medical procedures undertaken for the hospice foundation was due to be submitted to its board last week, while a separate investigation by the Western Health Board into allegations of bullying is still continuing.
"Terminally-ill patients who would ordinarily be admitted to Galway Hospice, are being treated in University College Hospital, Galway, in overcrowded wards while 11 state-of-the-art beds lie empty in Galway Hospice in Renmore," Glór's spokeswoman, Ms Máirín Mhic Dhonnchadha, said.
"There are no winners as things stand at the moment in Galway Hospice." All members of staff were affected, but the big losers were the patients.
The facility had been built with voluntary funding and fund-raising was now affected, Ms Mhic Dhonnchadha added. She called on all relevant parties to come together and "resolve this unacceptable situation".
Ms O'Flaherty said if there was anything alarming in the independent review, the home care service would have been affected. The fact that it was continuing, administered by the same medical team, suggested that the hospice itself should be open to patients.
"If we don't have progress sooner rather than later, we will take this all the way to the Dáil," she warned.
A separate protest group, the Galway Hospice Association, supported Saturday's march.
Some 20,000 signatures demanding that the hospice be reopened have been collected by the association.