The biggest industrial action in the history of the State, the nine-day nurses' strike, has increased the hospital in-patients waiting list by 3,619, according to the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen. A further 3,300 hospital procedures were cancelled.

These provisional figures meant that the waiting list rose from 33,381 before the strike to 37,200 afterwards, he told Opposition health spokespersons.

The Minister said he would be holding a series of meetings with all the health agencies, beginning today, with a view to getting service levels back to normal as quickly as possible. He met the Nursing Alliance earlier this week to reassure it on the need to move forward positively on the issues it wanted addressed.

Fine Gael's health spokesman, Mr Alan Shatter, challenged the Minister that, at 37,200, the figures were the highest for some years. He called on Mr Cowen to accept that negotiations with the nurses should have been undertaken sooner to "avoid the disastrous increase in the waiting lists, which can best be described as an escalated waiting list crisis".

The Minister replied, however, that "having inherited an escalating waiting lists problem we not only stabilised it but were starting to reduce it for the first time in five years".

He said that the waiting lists, even after the strike, were still "significantly lower than the figures bandied about by the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association and by Opposition politicians who seem to have the ability to gauge the increase without having the facts available to them". Mr Cowen told the Dail that up to the start of the strike there was a continuing reduction of 9 per cent in waiting lists since the beginning of the year, the first year-on-year reduction in four years.

Ms Liz McManus, Labour's health spokeswoman, said, however, that the Minister inherited a problem and "managed, through his own incompetence, to exacerbate it enormously to a situation where the waiting lists have lengthened despite a Government commitment to tackle the problem".

She said it was extraordinarily "tardy" for the Minister to have a meeting today rather than last week to ensure the agencies had practical measures in place, and she called on the Minister to ensure that hospital services did not wind down as early as usual for the Christmas period.

Mr Cowen denied he was tardy and said the government "of which she was a member witnessed a rise of more than one third in the short period it was in office".

He added that the strike had had an effect, but not to the extent of the 45,000 figure mentioned in a daily newspaper, which was incorrect. Journalists, he said, "should sometimes recognise that individuals have a vested interest in suggesting that the numbers are higher than they are in an attempt to obtain more funds for their members and are not as objective as they claim to be".