A member of the Irish Medical Organisation's Consultant Committee has said the current overcrowding in Irish hospitals is "no longer a surge" but the "new normal".
Emergency consultant Dr Mick Molloy said the issue is affecting every hospital across the country.
"We're now in a situation where the population demand is so much that the current bed capacity ... isn't sufficient to deal with the population we have. And yet we haven't really invested in developing that bed capacity."
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Dr Molloy said acute bed capacity needed to be significantly enhanced along with bed capacity in the elective hospital system.
He said that if half a million tourists arrived in Ireland for St Patrick's Day and could not find a hotel room, that problem would be rectified by the following year.
Dr Molloy said this is the volume of people who are potentially left without beds every single year, and it is a year-on-year problem.
Currently some hospitals are operating at up to 130% capacity on a daily basis, he added. "This is unsafe and people are dying as a result."
Dr Molloy said that bed capacity reports published over two decades ago promised an additional 5,000 beds.
"I think you could build a house with all the plans, and you can certainly build a hospital with all the reports that have been published. You'd certainly have enough material for foundations," he said.
Dr Molloy said that the system was completely wrong and concentrates on treating the sickest and then there is a triage system to deal with less serious problems.
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He said: "Unfortunately the people who are on trolleys are deemed to be those who can wait longer than the most, most urgent patients."
Dr Molloy said many patients who are forced to wait years for surgery often turn up to emergency departments and refuse to leave until they receive treatment.
He said an aging GP population has resulted in emergency departments being "the pressure valve in the system".
"What enters the emergency department doesn't all need to be admitted. So of the 100 patients who come into the emergency department, only about 20 to 22 of those need to be admitted to the acute system. But we just don't have the bed capacity to admit all those patients now."
