Aisling Dolan
The measure only exists where this member actually spoke in the debate their vote belongs to, and where that vote can be tied to a specific question. Both cuts are steep.
| Votes cast | 419 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 144 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 48 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 4 |
The third row is the sharpest cut. A committee-stage sitting can hold fifteen divisions while its speeches discuss forty-two numbered amendments, and the record does not say which amendment each division was. Those votes are counted here and deliberately left unscored rather than guessed.
The same scorable votes, split by whether the member went with their party. The top-right cell is the one worth reading: a stated position reversed while following the party line.
| Voted with own party | Voted against own party | |
|---|---|---|
| Matched their words | 2 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 96 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
Every case the pipeline flagged, with the contribution it read and the vote as recorded. Judge them yourself — that is the point of showing them rather than only the rate.
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
-----and there is a totally different ball game. How does Sinn Féin stand over its councillors when they vote against housing? How does that work? This is a cost-of-living Bill because this Government, and all parties in it, realise the challenges that face people, families, communities and businesses. At each and every step, the Department of Social Protection and its Minister, Deputy Humphreys, have delivered packa…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I should mention and remind the House that we have the largest budget ever dedicated to housing in this State at over €3 billion. The raft of legislation before the House today is to support businesses. That is what this Bill is about. It is about supporting small and micro companies and medium-size companies. It is incredible. Previously, there was legislation about the Government providing more accessible and cost-…
Valence runs −1 (negative) to +1 (positive). This is a separate measure from alignment above and says nothing about how anyone voted — "the Minister has been asleep at the wheel" is strongly negative and carries no position on the question.
| Model | Speeches scored | Mean valence | Corpus mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| vader | 584 | +0.750 | +0.423 |
Mean tone by topic, most negative first. Topics come from an LDA model fitted over debate contributions; the terms are the model's, the labels are hand-assigned.
| Topic | Speeches | Mean valence |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 6 | +0.568 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 15 | +0.591 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 7 | +0.595 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 28 | +0.601 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 16 | +0.718 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 89 | +0.747 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 25 | +0.750 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 62 | +0.753 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 43 | +0.777 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 26 | +0.783 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 101 | +0.797 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 12 | +0.803 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 11 | +0.806 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 9 | +0.864 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 34 | +0.906 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 13 | +0.916 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 26 | +0.922 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 23 | +0.936 |
Contributions whose tone sits more than two standard deviations from this member's own average. Baselines are per member on purpose — an absolute threshold would just rank people by temperament.
Today, 24 February, war was declared by Russia on the Ukraine, a European country of over 40 million people. This is war and the worst conflict in Europe since the Second World War. How many survivors of that war are alive? How long do we have living memory of…
This is the first time I have spoken today on the Bill. I very much welcome the legislation. To follow up on the comments of my colleagues, the legislation that is being brought before the House is unique; there has been nothing like it before. It is fantastic…
I thank the Minister of State for the update and the acknowledgement of funding in the area. The DEIS identification process and the inclusion of schools with children who are at risk is urgently required to ensure that all schools are appropriately equipped t…
I understand the Minister, Deputy Foley, is not present but as the Minister of State is the representative of the Government today, I must tell him I do not see the timeline in the response. Is there a timeline for when we are going to see the identification m…
I refer to a topic I have raised previously. Senator Murphy will be familiar with it as well. It is about community groups having to come together to challenge local authorities when it comes to inappropriate planning and locations of transfer stations on site…
I shall give half of my time to Senator Tim Lombard. I came in here believing that we had turned a corner. I say that because what started out as a fantastic initiative has caused a hell of a lot of difficulties and division in rural areas. Now, I have heard S…
I join with Senator McDowell. Senator Norris is a Joycean scholar who has brought so much colour to the Seanad. To have been in the Chamber to at least hear him speak has been a real honour for me as well. Everything that Senator Norris achieved and what he di…
I thank the Acting Chairperson. It is great to see her here today as chair of the Irish Women's Parliamentary Caucus. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Feighan. It is clear that there is cross-party support for immediate movement on this matter. I am pro…
I welcome the Minister of State. I acknowledge Senator Kyne, as a Senator from the west of Ireland, for tabling this motion. In 2022, we attended a presentation by Professors Michael Kerin and Maccon Keane. These consultants took time out of an unbelievably pr…
I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Madigan, for coming here this morning to deal with this matter. No schools have been assessed to be included for extra supports under the DEIS scheme since 2015 and only a small number were added in 2017. Schools are not c…
Amendment No. 67 mentions including "reflecting regional concerns". I would see our technological universities represent the regions they come from by their very nature. The new technological universities we are seeing, for example, in Athlone, Galway and Slig…
I thank the Acting Chairperson. It is very important that he is in the Chairperson's seat for this debate. I thank the Minister and his Department for continuing to hear statements on this issue. This independent report is a significant body of work that was l…
Alignment by the party a member sat for on the day, with 95% Wilson intervals. This is the test the measure could have failed.
| Party | Aligned | 95% CI | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| PBP | 82.5% | 68–91% | 40 |
| LAB | 78.2% | 69–85% | 101 |
| IND | 76.5% | 72–81% | 327 |
| SF | 75.8% | 69–81% | 198 |
| SD | 71.4% | 58–82% | 49 |
| FG | 69.1% | 62–76% | 162 |
| FF | 67.9% | 60–75% | 165 |
| GP | 56.8% | 41–71% | 37 |
Members of government parties align their stated position with their vote 9.4 points less often than Independents — bootstrap 95% CI [+2.7, +16.0], which excludes zero. Opposition parties sit 9.5 points above government too, CI [+3.1, +15.9]. Independents and opposition members are indistinguishable from each other (−0.0 points, CI [−6.3, +6.2]). So the gap does not come from having no party; it comes from being in government, which is what a whip effect should look like. Read this as the measure behaving sensibly, not as a finding about any individual.
Two automated methods were built and both failed. What survives is the rule-based layer, which is why the coverage above is narrow.
| Method | Accuracy | 95% CI | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| nli-vs-mover-anchor:deberta | 35.9% | 29–42% | 234 |
| nli-vs-mover-anchor:distilroberta | 11.5% | 8–16% | 234 |
Zero-shot entailment was asked to judge contributions whose true position is known — the member moved the amendment, so the answer is support by construction — and got it right 11.5% of the time, returning "unclear" or "oppose" for nearly everything. A classifier trained on the rule-labelled cases over the corpus embeddings reached 71.1% against a 65.3% majority-class baseline: better than chance, not better enough. Both are excluded from every figure on this page. Only the rule-based cascade, which is exact where it fires and silent where it does not, is used.
Position is read from the member's own contributions in the debate section the division belongs to, by a three-step cascade: an explicit move of the question ("I move amendment No. 5", true by construction); declarative stance phrases ordered so negations are tested first, because "I cannot support" and "I do not oppose" both defeat a naive keyword match; and, where neither fires, a zero-shot entailment model judging the contribution against the question put. Tone uses a separate model and is reported separately. Agreement against hand-labelled cases, with bootstrap intervals, is on the evidence page; no score here should be read without it.