Antoinette Doyle rubs her tired eyes and says she wants to go home and get some sleep, but she can't, she says.
Yesterday morning, her 84-year-old mother, Mary, has been waiting on a hospital trolley in the Mater Hospital in Dublin for five days since falling ill with a bladder infection last Saturday, and is getting more distressed as time goes on.
"My mother told me the other day that she wished they'd let her go when she had a cardiac arrest," Antoinette, from Ballymun, says sadly, running her fingers up and down the gold chain around her neck.
"She feels guilty about what the rest of us are going through, but she's not able to sleep. She's very upset about all this."
It's a cold, grey morning outside the Mater Hospital's A&E unit in Dublin. Antoinette has been told her mother is first on the list to get a bed when it becomes available. Others gather outside, in a haze of cigarette smoke, who have also been told their relatives will also get beds.
Inside, the unit is bleak and uninviting. There are at least 15, mostly elderly, patients either on trolleys or on chairs, beneath the glare of fluorescent strip lighting. There is one toilet in the unit with a faulty tap which, relatives say, is often dirty and gut-churning.
In one of the cubicles is an older man with a blood-clot in his leg, who has been waiting for a bed for three days. He is looking for something to rest his leg on but can't find anything. He had earlier washed himself and changed his clothes in the unit's cramped toilet.
Another elderly woman is attending to her husband. She has washed him and brought in some food and pillows. On a previous visit, he was forced to wait up to six days for a bed, he tells one visitor.
Antoinette's mother is lying on a hospital trolley beside the sluice room. When a gynaecolo- gist came to see her on Tuesday, according to Antoinette, the consultant said the assessment couldn't be carried out because the conditions were unacceptable.
"It all makes me very angry," Antoinette says. "My mother used to work in Holles Street Hospital as a domestic. She's still paying tax on the pension she had from her job. Myself and my sister don't get the carer's allowance for looking after her. She has literally cost the State nothing and now, when she needs a bed, she can't get it."
In the afternoon a group of relatives gathers alongside the busy North Circular Road outside the Mater Hospital. They are angry about the lack of beds, but supportive of staff working in what they say are challenging and difficult conditions.
Nurses say there have been worse days than today. There are sometimes more than 30 patients waiting in a unit designed to accommodate half that number.
"This is an ongoing problem which successive ministers of health have been aware about," says Ellen Cogavin, a clinical nurse manager in Dublin's James Connolly Hospital, who has stopped by to voice her support for patients' relatives.
"I see it in my own hospital, it's in every hospital. This is everywhere. Nurses are under a lot of stress.
"Not alone are they looking after A&E patients, but they are nursing patients who should be assigned to a ward. Nurses are leaving the service and reducing their hours and it's all down to the stress of the job."
Gerard Byrne and his sister Janette, who are helping to set up an action group to pressurise the Government into resolving the issue, have arrived at the hospital to check on their 72-year-old mother.
She has just been moved to a bed in the hospital after waiting several days in A&E, but Gerard's voice is gritted with anger as he recalls what his mother has just been through.
"It's like a warzone in there. You can't sleep, there are bleepers and sirens going off. Then you have drug addicts and drunks running around the place. It's a stressful situation," he says.
"Our mother was on a trolley since the weekend, there were blood stains on the floor and on the bars of the cot that she was in. The hospital administrator told us they couldn't be cleaned because it would intrude on the privacy of the patient.
"She got a bed yesterday, but she had bedsores from lying there so long and she's also picked up the winter vomiting bug. She's worse now than before she went in."
Gerard and Janette were involved in a protest outside the Dáil earlier this week. They are planning another protest meeting later in the week with other patients' relatives.
"You have to try and make a difference," says Janette, who took the State to court three years ago after the Mater Hospital was forced to repeatedly cancel vital cancer treatment for her.
"Sometimes you feel invisible. I wanted to stand up and scream at the politicians in the Dáil the other day. I felt like shouting at them to stop waffling and deal with the crisis. I'm sick of everyone trying to blame everyone else."
As she speaks, Gerard's phone rings regularly with calls from patients' relatives who have heard about the new pressure group and want to get involved. He takes down their names and telephone numbers on a tattered piece of paper.
One woman who recognises him from a television report the night before stops him and tells him about what her father went through last August. He adds her name and number to the growing list.
In the early evening Antoinette's mobile phone rings. It is the hospital, saying they have found a bed for her mother. She will be moved within minutes.
"It's great news," Antoinette says later, after accompanying her mother to her hospital bed.
"She smiled and said to me, 'this is very comfy', after lying on the trolley so long. It shows the difference a bed makes. They put a soft thing under the bed as well. We know she'll be looked after now. We can all begin to relax again, but this issue needs to be kept alive."
Antoinette leaves, planning to catch up on some sleep tonight and return to work at the Ballymun youth reach centre today for the first time this week. But she is not content to let matters lie.
"We've rattled a few bars today and maybe that's helped. Beds are being miraculously found. But there are others, and there will be more who have to go through what our relatives are going through. We won't let it all end here."