Alison Comyn
Not yet computed for this member.
The alignment pipeline has not produced a score here. That is usually because this member never spoke in a debate section that went to a division with an attributable question — see the coverage table below.
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 | 151 | +0.567 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 15 | +0.349 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 5 | +0.405 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 12 | +0.408 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 8 | +0.431 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.505 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 11 | +0.591 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 31 | +0.639 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 18 | +0.846 |
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.
I thank the Minister for coming to the House today. I wholeheartedly support Senator O'Loughlin's Bill. Catfishing, as we know, is a growing problem in our digital age where individuals create fake online identities to deceive others, often for financial gain,…
Before I begin, I express my deepest sympathies to the families, friends and colleagues of the two men who lost their lives in yet another day of tragedy, this time on my local roads at Gormanston, County Meath. I am also thinking of the two women who were ver…
I want to speak about the really stark report from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre that was launched this morning, but before I do, I have to refute the opinion of Senator Keogan about Fianna Fáil, an incredible party that I am proud to be a member of. We are th…
I want to raise an issue of serious concern today that was reported by one of my former colleagues, Mr. John Kierans, in the Drogheda Independent this week relating to ambulance cover in Drogheda and the wider north-east region. Paramedics quoted in the articl…
I think we all agree that we are living in very turbulent, worrying and anxious times. It has never been more important to have somebody on the end of a phone to help us with our mental health and to listen. I speak today in favour of the organisation Save Our…
Colette Campbell, Theresa Morgan and Bernie Cranley are the names of three of the five women who so tragically lost their lives over the weekend on Irish roads. A driver, three pedestrians and a cyclist, these women were killed in counties Clare, Meath, Wexfor…
Before I begin, I send my deepest sympathies to Andrew and Mary Rogers, the parents of Marie Claire Rogers, a young nurse who died tragically and very suddenly in Australia. She was just 24 years of age and was from Togher in County Louth. My sympathies are wi…
I thank the Minister of State for outlining what, I am afraid, we already knew, which is the very long and varied history of this particular school dating back to 2013, which I did not even mention. This has been 12 years in the pipeline. I note the Minister o…
I raise a serious situation at Our Lady of Lourdes emergency department in Drogheda, County Louth, which reached breaking point over the weekend, as outlined by a report by my former colleague, John Kierans on the front page of the Drogheda Independent this we…
It would be an insult to the members of the Defence Forces and, perhaps, to donkeys as well. Gabhaim buíochas leis an Seanadóir as sin.…
Cuirim fáilte roimh na haíonna. A few weeks ago, I wrote in The Journal about domestic abuse against men in Ireland and the urgent need to fund a fully staffed 24-hour helpline through Men's Aid. I did this very carefully knowing that it is a very sensitive sp…
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.