*Peter O’Connell and Violet-Anne Wynne. Photograph: John Mangan
CLARE TD, Violet-Anne Wynne (IND) has said her own housing situation is no longer up for public discussion.
In June of last year, Violet-Anne said she, her partner John and their six children were homeless after receiving a notice to quit from the Kilrush property they had been renting.
As a TD, Violet-Anne is paid €101,193 and as a Clare-based representative, she is entitled to €31,365 a year in travel and accommodation allowances. However, she said in an interview last June that failure to pay rent at a previous rental property and her partner’s use of medical cannabis may be preventing them from finding a family home.
Violet-Anne and her partner John had rent arrears of €12,126 over a four-year period dating to June 3, 2016 for a property at Tullycrine. A commercial loan of €12,126 was given by Sinn Féin to Deputy Wynne. Rural Resettlement Ireland (RRI) took a case against Ms Wynne over the failure to pay rent but the housing charity no longer existed when details of the TD’s debt emerged after her election to the Dáil in February 2020.
When asked this week by The Clare Echo what is the up-to-date position on her housing arrangement, Wynne’s parliamentary assistant advised, “we’ve decided on foot of what happened with the Ceann last week that there will be no discussion on the housing situation or anything like that. The only address that is important is 64 Parnell Street, the constituency office, people’s private housing is something else”.
Deputy Wynne stated, “There is a need to broaden the definition on homelessness, I’ve had conversations with the Simon Community around this, they spoke of their Locked Out survey which found one in four had experienced some form of homelessness or somebody in their family had experienced homelessness, the reality is about 290,000 people in this country have experienced some form of homelessness but because our definition is so restrictive it doesn’t allow for those people to be included and that is an issue, if you don’t have a secure home for anybody, if they have to go live on couches or anything where they don’t have their own shelter or family, I would consider homelessness”.
It was then put to the TD that the 8,987 people in Clare who gave her a first preference vote three years ago would surely have an interest to know if their elected representative has secured permanent housing, the Kilrush woman said such questioning was never put to her by the public.
“I don’t get asked those questions from the public, it is just media who raise it with me but constituents don’t, they only want to engage with me about my work and what I’m doing, if they know I’m experiencing any difficulties in the past but we don’t tend to mention anything and just get on with the job at hand, that’s what I spend every day focusing on, just doing the work, whatever is going on in my personal life does not deflect or distract me from what is going on in my job because it is such a privilege to be a TD in itself and to be able to represent people, to be able to raise issues, for me everything else comes after that”.
Her views on housing policy are not discounted by the public, she affirmed. “Social media is a totally different ball game, when I’m having interactions with people there is no conversation around that anymore and in fact there never really was, it was only media that had much of an interest in that, maybe other political parties. From interactions with community groups and individuals, it’s never been brought up actually”.
