Brendan Howlin
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 | 646 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 51 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 30 | |
| … 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 | 6 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 21 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 (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted NIL · with their party
I agree with Deputy Martin Kenny that the normal way of dealing with justice legislation is to have a protracted discussion, pre-legislative scrutiny and then a detailed Committee Stage debate. We should not vary from that, except to deal with issues that are absolutely imperative, a point I raised during the briefings. There are number of component parts of this omnibus Bill. I wish to address the part dealing with …
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
Most of us were taken by surprise when we saw this on the Order Paper to be taken without debate. Those of us who lived through the period when this report was commissioned and so on understand how fraught an era that was. It would be useful to have a more considered period before the report is withdrawn. Perhaps the Ceann Comhairle could inform the House, from a procedural point of view, how a report that has been f…
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 | 503 | +0.337 | +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 | 8 | -0.225 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 29 | +0.015 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 44 | +0.053 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 6 | +0.260 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.325 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 119 | +0.420 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 22 | +0.474 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 76 | +0.492 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 7 | +0.501 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 5 | +0.595 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 14 | +0.626 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 44 | +0.669 |
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. 17: In page 5, line 14, after “ section 2 or 3 ” to insert “or section 10 of the Non-Fatal Offences against the Person Act 1997”. As the Ceann Comhairle said, we discussed this issue on Committee Stage. In the original Bill I drafted, to a…
People will know this Bill has been a long time in gestation since I introduced it three years ago. Technology has changed as well and so we need to look very carefully at every aspect of it. All of the debate thus far on the Bill has focused on the sharing of…
I welcome the views set out by the Tánaiste, but I am anxious to know what is going to happen as a result of those actions. The situation is a crisis. It is like watching what happened in Rwanda where there were mass deaths. The world is outraged, but what is …
I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to provide, in connection with the proceeds of crime, that certain conduct occurring outside the State is criminal conduct notwithstanding that it does not constitute an offence under the law of…
I am just trying to understand the logic of it. Clearly, the Children Act does not apply to anybody who is over 18. The Minister's base point is, as I understand it, that anomalous category. My contention is that you cannot create a perfect equality between so…
As most people confine themselves to their homes or least to their home areas, major issues are unfolding across our world. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which was seen by all of us, seen by the world, opened up yet again the unresolved cancer of …
I warmly welcome the tabling of these statements and the opportunity to contribute to the debate. I strongly support the very direct words of the Taoiseach in his opening remarks to victims of domestic violence - largely women, as well as some children and men…
I thank the Minister of State for accepting the potential of my proposed subsection (2). I do not know whether it is technically possible to amend my amendment simply to add that subsection to the existing section 4. The Ceann Comhairle might be able to advise…
Clearly, one issue dominated the European Council and, indeed, dominates all our thoughts in this House, in this country and in Europe and beyond. The carnage we are witnessing on a daily basis in Gaza is truly sickening. Our first priority must be to halt the…
If I could make mention since the Minister of State has raised the issue, I was unaware when I came in that there had been a tragedy. I had been working in my office. Last weekend, I went down to the memorial site in Drinagh Business Park because on 8 December…
I raise with the Taoiseach legislation the House passed on Second Stage last December, in its final act of the previous session, namely, the Proceeds of Crime (Gross Human Rights Abuses) Bill 2020. I introduced the Bill which is what is known as a Magnitsky Ac…
All European debate is still dominated by the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. It remains critical that Russia is called out at every international forum, whether a meeting of the EU Council, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which recently …
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.