Alan Farrell
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 | 730 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 18 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 11 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
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 | 1 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 6 | 0 |
Not scored: 7 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 4 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
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 | 391 | +0.574 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 19 | +0.211 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.347 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 15 | +0.419 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 10 | +0.525 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 11 | +0.704 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 32 | +0.710 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 16 | +0.746 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 16 | +0.747 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 15 | +0.776 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 12 | +0.796 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 22 | +0.861 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 9 | +0.890 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 9 | +0.906 |
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.
The difficulty many of us have, which we have articulated here or at meetings of the committee over recent weeks, is that whatever about the redundancies offered in 2020, the DAA knew by 2021 that it was looking at an uptake in numbers. Therefore, it was compl…
I raise the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, report published yesterday, the National Waste Statistics Summary Report for 2020. It shows that waste generation in Ireland continues to increase and that our rising levels of waste make it very difficult for …
I am reluctant to come into the House and raise the following issue again but unfortunately the numbers are going in the wrong direction. In the children's disability network team in my area of community healthcare organisation 9, the numbers are going in the …
I thank the Minister for presenting this Bill, which is very important in the context of a number of areas in her Department. Crime tears at the fabric of our society. It chips away at the dignity and pride of our communities and it lures vulnerable young peop…
In light of the recent spate of horrific attacks on young women, in particular, the murder of Ashling Murphy in January, and the publication of the gender-based violence policy the Government will bring forward soon, which cannot be published soon enough, will…
I thank the Minister for her reply. At this time last year, the Ceann Comhairle agreed to the illumination of Leinster House to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women as part of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Vio…
Domestic, sexual and gender-based violence rates have seen a significant increase in recent years, particularly, and regrettably, during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Government is due to publish the third iteration of national policy developed by the Department …
Unfortunately, as I have already stated that will not be possible. Time was not allowed for that and it was not brought to my attention, I regret to say, until it was too late. I had assumed the slot finished at 7 p.m., in which case there would have been plen…
I want to raise the national strategy on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence 2016-21, which has rightly focused on awareness and education in recent years. Given recent events that I myself experienced along with thousands of men, women and children up …
As the Taoiseach is aware, the HSE is having significant and sustained issues with retaining suitable staff to complete the 91 children's disability network teams across the country. Will he please outline the steps the Government is taking to arrest this crit…
The Deputy does not have to agree if she does not want to. We are not in a position to take a break. If the Deputy does not want to agree she does not have to, but it will mean that the Independent group and Deputies Danny and Michael Healy-Rae will lose time.…
I thank the Minister. I very much appreciate him outlining the detail on domestic violence leave. The five days is very welcome. This measure has been introduced at an appropriate time, given the unfortunate rise in the number of cases of domestic, sexual and …
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.