Brendan Griffin
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 | 725 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 30 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 22 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 1 |
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 | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 8 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 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 | +0.487 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 9 | +0.095 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 30 | +0.520 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.633 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 11 | +0.669 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 16 | +0.684 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 8 | +0.720 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 11 | +0.737 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 6 | +0.740 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 7 | +0.798 |
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 planning relating to this matter needs to be more medium-term and long-term too. Unfortunately, the Russians, and we know their form, appear to be dug in for a war of attrition. They do not care how long this goes on or how many people die. They do not car…
Last Thursday, I raised the issue of cocaine use in our communities, and the normalisation of the use of cocaine that we have seen creep in in recent years. The reaction that I got over the weekend was one I did not expect. There was an enormous reaction. I re…
It is welcome that milk prices are rising, but those who are locked in to prices face an enormous challenge. The stress and fear these people are facing are very worrying. I again call out Ornua. It is my understanding that the company was asked to appear befo…
I concur with what Deputy Creed said. The vision must be there. I am always reluctant to raise road projects, particularly new ones, with the Minister in the Chamber because it has been a recipe for abject disappointment over the past number of years. I know t…
Pepper Finance recently wrote to some mortgage holder to inform them that the interest rate on their mortgages is increasing. In one case with which I am dealing, the rate is rising from 8.74% to 9.24%. That is more than double the ECB base rate. This is a dis…
The recent sickening attacks on our gardaí carrying out their duties have appalled most people in this country. They are extremely worrying and concerning. The lack of regard for the uniform that has crept in in some places is extremely disturbing. The lack of…
RTÉ workers are protesting outside the gates of Leinster House this lunchtime over the issue of bogus self-employment. This is an issue I have raised with the Taoiseach and here in the Chamber on a number of occasions. A total of 396 workers were let go by RTÉ…
For the information of the House, I was appalled to see what has surfaced in the past 24 hours. I have today asked officials to draft letters to my counterpart in the UK and also to the broadcasters, Sky and BT Sport, expressing our outrage about this matter. …
I welcome all such moves. They are all heading in the right direction but the question is whether enough is being done. The question of using the revenue generated rather than realising the full value of assets needs to be revisited. The EU also needs to co-or…
I commend the Minister on her work on this. This is very reforming legislation. It is something that is needed, unfortunately, perhaps even more in 2022 than ever. It was needed in the past and it is great that it is finally about to become reality. Most of us…
This question relates to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the impacts on Irish agriculture. First and foremost, I utterly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is an appalling, barbaric act and has caused untold misery, death and destruction all over …
Last night, the Mayor of Killarney, Councillor Niall Kelleher, and I met with a number of Ukrainian refugees and stakeholders from the community in Killarney on the outrageous proposal to relocate 135 Ukrainian refugees, mainly women and children, from Killarn…
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.