The major Dublin teaching hospitals have set up a working party to look for ways to tackle the shortage of nurses in the city.
Meanwhile, Tallaght General Hospital is recruiting nurses from India and Finland as well as the Philippines and England to keep its services operating fully. Its deputy chief executive said yesterday that recruitment from abroad by Irish hospitals would continue for the foreseeable future.
Some hospitals, such as Beaumont and Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, have had to postpone operations because of nurse shortages.
Others have been able to bridge the gap by recruiting nurses abroad, but all the major Dublin hospitals face a continuing outflow of Irish nurses, driven out by the high cost of living and of accommodation.
The Irish Nurses' Organisation said that while the problem was at its most acute in Dublin, shortages existed in urban centres around the State, except in the Western Health Board area.
Ms Catherine MacDaid, deputy chief executive officer of Tallaght General Hospital, said the working group set up recently by the major teaching hospitals would have a crucial role in finding a solution to the problem.
Tallaght had been involved in a "massive" recruitment campaign abroad and had to keep recruitment going because "as quick as you recruit there's always movement from nursing". It was important, however, to look within our own country as well, she said.
A spokeswoman at the Mater Hospital said "things are good at the moment here" because of the recruitment of Filipina nurses, 38 of whom started work just over a fortnight ago following seven weeks' of preparation.
But she added that the cost of living in Dublin continued to drive nurses out of the city. Many nurses trained in Dublin and then went down the country, she said.
It is clear from the packages offered by health services in various countries on agency websites that Ireland has some way to go to match Britain's NHS, at least as far as the accommodation issue is concerned.
NHS hospitals offer to subsidise the cost of accommodation throughout the nurse's contract whereas Irish hospitals generally offer help with accommodation only for a short period.
Mr David Hughes, director of industrial relations with the INO, said there was a general shortage of nurses internationally. "There are very few countries in the world that have more nurses than jobs for them," he said.
One of the key challenges is to get back into the workforce the thousands of nurses who are registered but are no longer in the profession. The INO is currently talking to the Health Service Employers' Agency about measures such as the introduction of part-time pensionable employment for nurses who return to work.
It is also seeking an end to the situation whereby general nurses who do courses for specialist areas have to pay hefty fees. "It might help if people could get trained without it costing an arm and a leg," he said.
The health services were now reaping the harvest of treating nurses badly in the days when there was a surplus, he said, and of the cutbacks in the number of nurses being trained in the late 1980s and early 1990s.