This week's findings that 2,900 adults in Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow are homeless made headlines, but a similar story has been told this year by voluntary groups in other parts of the State.

Cork has about 300 homeless people, a survey conducted by the Department of Applied Social Studies at University College Cork, for the Cork Housing Forum, suggests.

Researchers there found 287 homeless - men, women and children - in one week in April.

But there are striking differences between Cork and Dublin. In Cork, 69 per cent of people surveyed stayed in hostels. In Dublin, which has an accommodation crisis, only 38 per cent were using a hostel.

In Cork, 11 per cent had spent the week in a caravan or tent. No one in Dublin was in this category, according to the research by the Homeless Initiative.

But if Cork can accommodate more of its homeless in hostels, it is no different from Dublin when it comes to people getting stuck in homelessness.

In both cities about half of those surveyed had been homeless for a year or more. Indeed, in Cork, a third had been homeless for more than two years.

It is this aspect that concerns Ms Michelle Norris, lecturer in social policy at University College Cork. Emergency hostel accommodation "does not meet the needs of long-term homeless people who need access to transitional housing to help them settle in a home of their own", she says in Cornerstone, the magazine published by the Homeless Initiative.

This, in itself, is an example of how serious the situation is in Dublin where, for hundreds of people, the problem is not how to get into transitional housing but how to get an emergency shelter for the night.

Galway also has a homelessness problem, though, as in other towns and cities outside the capital there is a very low incidence of people sleeping rough.

In the city 963 people were homeless at some stage last year, according to a report, Homelessness in Galway, prepared for Galway Simon Community by Dr Padraig MacNeela.

As in Cork, many stayed in emergency shelters or a hostel. In all, 644 people stayed at emergency shelters and 286 women and children at a women's refuge.

Since these are figures for the whole year, they cannot be compared directly with those from Dublin and Cork which provide a "snapshot" of the situation.

Between December 1998 and March 1999, 78 people were found to be sleeping rough in the city.

Dr MacNeela's estimate is that between five and 20 people sleep rough in the city on any given night of the year. He estimates that 76 people are homeless in Galway on any given day.

There are gaps in Galway's homelessness provision. The report calls for funding for an emergency hostel for single women, a daycare centre for the homeless, and, as in Cork, resettlement schemes to get people into mainstream accommodation.

While the waiting-list for housing in Galway has over 800 people on it, only a handful of these are homeless.

Similarly, in Cork, only a third of homeless people are on the waiting-list. In Dublin, two-thirds are on the waiting-list, though by and large these are women with children (generally staying in insecure situations with relatives or friends) rather than single men, who make up 60 per cent of Dublin's homeless adults.

It would seem from this that many homeless people regard applying for housing as a pointless exercise.

In Dundalk, few if any people sleep rough, but Simon workers there say there is a growing number of people who are "one step away from the street", sleeping in bed-and-breakfast accommodation or on other people's floors, sometimes to the annoyance of neighbours.

"I know people are doubling up with other people," said Mr Paddy McBride, of the Simon Community. "Some people are going from place to place and from house to house."

More young people are turning up homeless in the town. Dundalk Simon has 25 beds and last month accommodated 36 people over 30 years of age (it tries to limit its accommodation to older homeless people). More comprehensive figures on homelessness in the town are expected to come later this year from a cross-Border project in which Simon is involved.

Mr McBride believes that for homelessness to be tackled properly, local authorities will have to be obliged to house homeless people, a move also called for by Galway Simon.

The prospects for the homeless are not good. They form a small percentage of the estimated 44,000 households on the housing waiting-lists, and many of them, as the surveys found, see little point in going on to waiting-lists.

The Society of St Vincent de Paul recently sought 8,000 social housing starts (mainly local authority but also voluntary schemes) a year for the next 10 years to deal with these and future applicants for housing.

This year, 3,700 houses will be provided by local authorities, according to a recent Dail reply by the Minister for Housing and Urban Renewal, Mr Molloy.

In the absence of a big increase in investment in social housing, it looks as though the homeless are with us to stay and that we can expect their numbers to increase.