Alice-Mary Higgins
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 | 414 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 318 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 101 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 48 |
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 | 39 | 1 |
| Contradicted their words | 7 | 0 |
Not scored: 217 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 2 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 support (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I will speak to a couple of these and indicate that there are a couple of areas where I may reserve the right to bring amendments on Report Stage, should these amendments be successful. I imagine they will be. I also have a couple of questions for the Minister. He has already partly answered one of them in relation to the question of a fleet. I was wondering where that fit in terms of haulage and hauliers. I think it…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I, too, want to signal a number of concerns in respect of this legislation. I believe, especially now on Second Stage, that the burden or obligation of proof is on the State. It must show us how these are not going to happen. It is not just for us to say that there may be inadvertent consequences because if they are warned about and action is not taken, then they are not inadvertent. What measures will the State take…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I thank the Minister of State for his response to my amendments. I would have liked more elaboration on the Government’s amendments because the proposals that the Government is putting forward will have significant consequences. While my amendments to the amendments have been addressed, when the Minister of State has the opportunity to come in again, he might elaborate on what the Government is doing with its differe…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
Recommendations Nos. 11 and 12 relate to the concern about the required threshold of only 30 days of annual occupancy in order for a property to be considered exempt from the proposed vacant property tax. This threshold is extremely low with regard to international norms. Dr. Gerard Turley, an economist at the University of Galway, noted that in other countries and cities throughout the world that have introduced vac…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
We have heard about the improvements to welfare in the industry. It is really important to be clear: any of these improvements have not come about by goodwill or a sudden revelation, or even simply because a documentary exposed the horror of the current practices within the greyhound industry. The changes to greyhound welfare have happened because the industry was made to change. Senator Ruane talked about the fact t…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.80) · voted TA · with their party
I will be very brief because I do not have amendments in this and those who do have amendments will be speaking and putting forward very good cases for why we need very good cases when making such a decision and, given, in fairness, some of what has been put forward by some of the Members regarding the arguments for why we need the Ministers of State, the importance of us actually having and being able to look at the…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.75) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 20: In page 10, line 15, to delete “of itself”. Amendments Nos. 20 to 24, inclusive, all relate to my concerns about how the Bill can impact the ability of people to freely protest. Amendment No. 20 seeks to strengthen the provisions that protect people involved in protest against prosecution for terrorist offences under section 6(5) of the 2005 Act by removing the words "of itself" so that the s…
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 | 3,320 | +0.446 | +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 | 34 | -0.168 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 87 | +0.354 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 54 | +0.468 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 46 | +0.471 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 56 | +0.544 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 61 | +0.552 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 129 | +0.553 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 1093 | +0.557 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 502 | +0.589 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 105 | +0.606 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 107 | +0.635 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 41 | +0.636 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 150 | +0.640 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 29 | +0.655 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 15 | +0.733 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 91 | +0.796 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 14 | +0.820 |
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.
There has been a quite a strong misrepresentation of my position, which I was actually quite clear on when I spoke. I would like that to be clarified. I did not suggest that people should be free to do whatever they want for these reasons. I was very clear tha…
Earlier in this debate, on Second Stage, the Minister began with an apology, in part, in respect of illegal adoptions. We have been speaking about these illegal adoptions but there is no reference anywhere in the Bill to "illegal". As Senator Boyhan says, it w…
Lithuania is not the only country; Poland is now considering leaving the convention as well. Frankly, the response is highly inadequate and is effectively a set of excuses. We are meant to be applauding Lithuania because rather than breaching international rul…
We need to stop trying to make a virtue of past mistakes. There were mistakes on the strategic housing developments. We highlighted exactly what would go wrong and it went wrong. There is the headline item here that we are bringing back planning. However, let …
Different legal systems, but I am saying, as the Minister described, they are cases of substantial criminal damage that are being done with an intention of compelling a government not to take an action, which is trying to compel governments not to allow arms t…
I would like if the Minister would address my amendments. He spoke about the fact that substituting "illegal" for "incorrect" could be seen as narrowing, but he did not address my amendments that add the term "illegal". He mentioned that the term "illegal" wou…
Let us not use the graffiti example. Let us use the examples that are in the courts at the moment in the UK and Germany, which relate to damage to a weapons system. If somebody damages a weapons system that is about to be used in violation of international law…
I, too, want to signal a number of concerns in respect of this legislation. I believe, especially now on Second Stage, that the burden or obligation of proof is on the State. It must show us how these are not going to happen. It is not just for us to say that …
It is a one-way clause that provides protection from failures to comply with any provision, while there is nothing in respect of protection from damages or compensation for successful compliance with any provision of the Bill or obligations or duties created t…
I move amendment No. 3: In page 4, to delete lines 17 to 20 and substitute the following: “ 3. (1) The Minister, or authorised persons, shall carry out inspections of aircraft— (a) seeking leave to land in the State under Article 5 of the Air Navigation (Carri…
When we say we should do everything we can, let us be clear that, going into the summer, Ireland is not doing everything we can. We cannot object to human rights abuses and call for a ceasefire and then take absolutely no action, continue with business as usua…
I move amendment No. 7: In page 4, between lines 35 and 36, to insert the following: “Amendment of Air Navigation (Carriage of Munitions of War, Weapons and Dangerous Goods) Order 1973 4. The Air Navigation (Carriage of Munitions of War, Weapons and Dangerous …
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.