Asked to sum up just how the problems besetting the troubled health system could be cured, the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, gave a brief reply. "In a nutshell," he told journalists, "you can't solve the problems of the health system in a nutshell."
The complicated and costly measures which need to be taken were what he spent yesterday explaining to his Cabinet colleagues at a special 4-1/2 hour meeting in Ballymascanlon, Co Louth.
The 28,000 people on waiting lists, or those who have just spent days on a hospital trolley in an accident and emergency department, may have thought differently, but according to the Taoiseach Mr Ahern, there is no crisis.
He made this point as he went into the meeting yesterday morning, saying it was an excellent, well-resourced health service on which more than £5 billion was spent each year on a population of almost 4 million people.
There were problems, particularly with waiting lists, but this Government, which has been four years in office, had inherited many of the difficulties. All-day Cabinet meetings, while not unusual, do signal concern for a particular issue on the Government's part and the Taoiseach is concerned at how the bad publicity generated by the health issue could affect a general election.
There was an expectation that some decisions would be announced following the meeting, not least from Mr Martin's comments beforehand that very significant amounts of money would be needed to set the health system to rights.
According to some estimates the budget would need to be quadrupled over the next 10 years.
However, as he left the meeting, the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, made clear that he had already been more than generous to the Department of Health and it would be taking its place in the queue with other Government Departments when the time came for the budgetary estimates.
No decisions had been made, he stressed. Almost £5.4 billion was being spent this year alone, and he assumed he would be seeing value for the taxpayers' money in the months and years ahead.
He had already alluded to the fact, he said, that he was not happy with how the money was being spent.
The briefing with Mr Martin which followed was short on specific figures, except that the first proper review of hospital beds undertaken had found that almost 5,000 extra beds in public hospitals would be needed over the next decade at a cost of £2 billion.
While funding was discussed, budgetary decisions were never made at meetings of this kind. Decisions, said Mr Martin, "would flow from this meeting".
It was never going to be a day for making decisions, said the Minister for Health. He made the point that the Cabinet should be afforded the opportunity, like everyone else involved, to have an input into the new overall strategy for the health system, currently being formulated, and due to be published in July.
However, after a weekend of media reports detailing the huge extra resources necessary, and the expectation of action to be taken to bring the health service up to par, there was a considerable sense of anticlimax as Ministers made their way back to Dublin.