The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) say that there is 760 people on trolleys around the country today.
The INMO confirmed that Monday was the worst day ever for overcrowding with a record number of patients without beds.
Even more staggering is the fact that the figures are higher than the amount of patients needed to fill Ireland and Dublin's largest hospital - St James's which has 707 beds.
INMO General Secretary, Phil Ní Sheaghdha, said: “Ireland’s beleaguered health service continues to break records in the worst possible way. Our members are working in impossible conditions to provide the best care they can.
“The excuse that this is all down to the flu simply doesn’t hold. There are always extra patients in winter, but we simply do not get the extra capacity to cope. This is entirely predictable, yet we seemingly fail to deal with it every year.
“The government need to immediately initiate a major incident protocol. We need to cancel elective surgeries, stop non-emergency admissions, and source extra capacity wherever we can.
“We also need to immediately scrap the HSE’s counterproductive recruitment pause, which is leaving these services understaffed and thus overcrowded.
“Behind these numbers are hundreds of individual vulnerable patients – it is a simply shameful situation. This is entirely preventable if proper planning was in place.”
