The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, briefed his Cabinet colleagues about the hospital admissions crisis yesterday.
Mr Martin said it was due to a seasonal increase in admissions to accident and emergency units in acute hospitals.
According to a Government spokesman, Mr Martin said a cold spell always brought an increase in admissions, and that this happened in every other European country.
The numbers being admitted to A&E units in recent days had declined since the Eastern Regional Health Authority appealed to those who were not seriously ill to attend their family doctors instead of going to hospitals.
He said that 500 extra hospital beds had been provided since the year 2000, and that 300 of these were in the eastern region which is experiencing the worst of the current overcrowding problems.
Some 1,400 step-down or convalescent beds had also been provided.
Some €45 million has been earmarked for the provision of additional hospital bed capacity and extra Accident and Emergency consultant doctors had been appointed, he told fellow ministers.
Mr Paudge Connolly, a Cavan-based TD who was elected on a hospitals' platform, said yesterday, however, that the break-up of the former Eastern Health Board into four separate health authorities had directly contributed to the A&E crises.
The creation of extra health boards had resulted in extra management jobs rather than extra efficiency, he said.
"That increase in the number of health boards drastically boosted the number of executive management posts in the Eastern region and directly correlates to the deterioration of health services there, where A&E crises have been developing over the past three years," he said.
Mr Connolly said the appeals made by hospitals for patients not to attend A&E departments were not confined to the Eastern region.
Management at Cavan General Hospital has written to all GPs in the region asking them not to refer patients to the hospital's A&E department, he said.
Meanwhile, the Health Service Employers' Agency has warned that industrial action by nurses' unions would worsen the already difficult situation in the country's emergency units.
The group, which represents hospital management and other health service employers was responding to threats of industrial action by the nursing unions in response the overcrowding crisis.