Barry Ward
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 | 639 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 86 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 43 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 8 |
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 | 5 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 43 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 support (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I will be brief. Section 69 essentially confers an unlimited jurisdiction, monetarily, on the District Court. It specifically states that where there is consent, that is, where the court is satisfied that an agreement has been reached between the parties and they have consented to proceedings being in the District Court, the family District Court, without limit as to monetary jurisdiction, can deal with the matter. M…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
To a large extent, I made the points I wanted to make on Second Stage. Even the Title of this Bill refers to "Health and Criminal Justice", two uncomfortable bedfellows. It is important to acknowledge this legislation is not desired by anybody. The Minister made it clear in his Second Stage speech that this was an undesirable situation to be in. We would all like for this situation to be finished. I have great sympat…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support the amendment, which seems to have identified a lacuna in the 2001 Act. We often talk in this country about the sex offenders register as though somewhere, there is an enormous ledger that can be opened and the name of a given offender found. Of course, that does not exist. What we call the sex offenders register is a set of obligations on people who have been convicted of certain offences, and they are not…
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 | 915 | +0.352 | +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 | 80 | -0.228 |
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 23 | -0.129 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 42 | +0.056 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 17 | +0.131 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 11 | +0.238 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 207 | +0.257 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 8 | +0.264 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 14 | +0.309 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 326 | +0.367 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 13 | +0.408 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 9 | +0.432 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 29 | +0.509 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 25 | +0.510 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 12 | +0.579 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 13 | +0.589 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 23 | +0.628 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 15 | +0.648 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 22 | +0.771 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 7 | +0.811 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 20 | +0.835 |
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 move amendment No. 3: In page 6, between lines 12 and 13, to insert the following: Conspiracy to murder 4. (1) A person who conspires, or otherwise agrees, whether in the State or elsewhere, with one or more persons, to murder, is guilty of an offence irresp…
I thank the Minister of State. I do not deny that the fees were cut at a time when there was a need to make cuts. It is not the case that criminal and legal aid fees were responsible for escalating legal costs, given that they are controlled by the Government …
I move amendment No. 1: In page 3, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following: “Amendment of section 2 of Act of 1990 2. The Act of 1990 is amended by the substitution of the following for section 2: “Sentence for treason and murder 2. (1) Subject to sub…
I am sorry. I do not know whether I need to repeat it, but I acknowledge what the Minister stated at the outset of this debate. The humility of his comments and his acknowledgement of mistakes in the context of this legislation were important. Senators have me…
Section 9 amends the Schedule to the Bail Act to list the offences under this Bill as being serious offences for the purposes of section 2. Sometimes there is a political rush to suggest that people should not get bail. I am aware of Private Members' Bills tha…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit chuig an Teach. Is dócha gurb é seo an chéad uair a chonaic mé sa Teach é ón am a cheapadh sa phost nua é. Mar sin, déanaim comhghairdeas leis freisin. The Minister of State will be very aware of the "Prime Time" programme ear…
The Deputy Leader will be aware that in the years since the sham presidential election in Belarus a number of Members of this House, the Dáil and the European Parliament have adopted Belarussian political prisoners. These people were imprisoned not because the…
This type of legislation is welcome. I agree with almost everything Senator O'Loughlin said in her contribution introducing the Bill to the House. I commend her and her colleagues on bringing it forward. It is timely and, regrettably, it is also necessary. A n…
With regard to this section, I welcome what is being proposed to broaden the scope of section 10 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. I am fully in agreement with what the Minister of State is proposing to do in section 10(a) of this Bill wit…
On subsection 5(2), the Minister of State has mentioned in his reply on amendment No. 18 the fact that the judge in proceedings is obliged to take into account the view of the alleged victim of the offence before making a direction under subsection (2). I have…
Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit as ucht teacht isteach chun déileáil leis an gceist seo. At first glance, "catfish" might sound like a non-native marine animal but this is something that has been brought to the fore in the past year or more by people using…
I suggest that already happens. It is already the case that when an accused goes to trial, it is open to him or her to challenge the evidence before the judge, in voir dire - in the absence of the jury - and to invite the judge to assess whether the evidence i…
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.