Pressure's mounting on the Government to announce plans to deal with the housing and homeless crisis.

Sinn Féin will use Dáil time this week to demand action, while Renua has published a plan to get more homes built.

The Simon Community is blaming government inaction for the crisis that's seeing 5,000 people in emergency accommodation.

The charity's Niamh Randall says there needs to be urgent action with rents and other areas:

“We need to look at making better use of existing state property and existing local authority hosing which is vacant,” she said.

Renua's published a plan to get pension funds to invest in homes and get them built - Party leader Lucinda Creighton says that's the only way to address the crisis:

“We want to see the roll-out of substantial of socials and community hosing over the next number of years. We believe this will deal with the huge supply side crisis,” she said.

Sinn Féin will use Dáil time tomorrow and Wednesday to call for action from Environment Minister Alan Kelly - the party's Dessie Ellis said “I’ve tackled him numerous times about rent controls and in conjunction with that a small increase in rent supplement.”

Minister Kelly says getting boarded up houses back into the system is the best short-term solution:

“If Dublin County Council can actually open up every single void by Christmas I will provide the funding,” he said.

New figures from Fianna Fáil show 2,600 such boarded up homes - local authorities are being told the money is there to make them habitable.

Housing charity Focus Ireland says building more homes won't resolve the short term crisis of homelessness.

The organisation was responding to Renua which today came out against the provision of modular homes for homeless families, and said building more houses was the only solution.

The party has published a bill providing for a multi-billion euro house building scheme.

But speaking on the Last Word on Today FM, Mike Allen of Focus said rent control was essential to deal with the short term problem.

“Some landlords – not all by any means – but some are taking advantage of the situation in a free market.

“What the minister is doing is very welcome – the only criticism I have of what he’s doing is (to say) hurry up and do it.

“Every landlord in the country has been given forewarning that there are controls coming in and most of them seem to be trying to get their increases in as quickly as possible,” he said.