A meeting between health boards and recruitment agencies will be held in Dublin in the coming days in an attempt to resolve the nurse staffing crisis.
An estimated 1,250 permanent nursing posts are vacant in the greater Dublin area and a further 600 around the State, the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) has said.
Mr Liam Doran, of the INO, yesterday said the crisis could be solved if the first two points in the staff nurse salary scale were abolished, allowing nurses to begin on £17,600 a year.
His comments came as recruitment agencies from around the world were competing for nursing staff at an exhibition in the RDS, Dublin. One Texas-based nursing agency said it had vacancies for 4,000 nurses.
Ms Marisa Valori, of the West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust in Britain, said she was seeking 150 nurses to work in four hospitals.
Others competing for nurses were the three area health boards in the eastern region, which require up to 400, and Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Dublin, which has 40 vacancies.
Mr Joseph Reid, of Global Personnel Services, said his Dublin-based agency was recruiting nurses in Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and the Philippines.
"We have taken on 192 over the last 15 days and they will start arriving in Dublin at the end of October," he said.
One nurse attending the exhibition, who is doing agency nursing in London, said she did not want to return to Dublin because of the high cost of accommodation. She is looking for a permanent post outside Dublin but said there was a lot of red tape and she found it very difficult to get a job.
"I really feel that I will leave nursing within the next few years if I can't get a job I want," she said.
"I think if Irish nurses were looked after in Ireland by their health boards, instead of them flying off to Australia and the Philippines to recruit, they would not have as big a problem filling positions."