Brian Leddin
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 | 733 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 12 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 6 | |
| … 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: 6 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 | 269 | +0.649 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 9 | +0.256 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 5 | +0.516 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 47 | +0.605 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 34 | +0.609 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 32 | +0.625 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 7 | +0.747 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 14 | +0.760 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 7 | +0.832 |
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 war has brought escalating oil and gas prices and a consequent cost-of-living challenge here in Ireland. It makes sense that we should reduce our gas and oil use for that reason alone. It also makes sense to reduce radically our fossil fuel use because mon…
It is shameful and pitiful that they have yielded to the interests of the few over the many. I say this with utter dismay because I have regard for my colleagues across this House. It is mind-boggling that politicians are railing against restoring nature here …
I commend the Taoiseach on the genuine and effective leadership he showed on the international stage last week. He told the international community that we do not have a minute to lose in our efforts to combat climate change. There is a missing piece in this c…
Ag an am seo gach bliain, cuirim romham cúpla rud a rá faoi Sheachtain na Gaeilge. Sna blianta roimhe seo, labhair mé go díreach ar ábhair a bhain leis an nGaeilge í féin, ach anuraidh bheartaigh mé cur síos a dhéanamh ar mo chuid oibre trí Ghaeilge. Is inneal…
I endorse and echo Deputy Hourigan's comments. This is a matter we should be examining. Regarding district heating, we must get the planning right in this regard. Under the national planning framework, the population of our regional cities is set to increase b…
Cosúil leis an Teachta Gannon, I find it very difficult to make my contribution as Gaeilge but we will persist. Gach bliain, bím ag tnúth le labhairt ar Sheachtain na Gaeilge nó, mar a thabharfaimid air i Luimneach i mbliana, Sneachta na Gaeilge. Gach bliain, …
I raise the issue of safety on our rural roads because another family has suffered an unbearable loss this week. Another innocent life has been taken, that of Aoibheann Duffy, an 11-year-old girl from County Kerry who was out for a cycle on a summer evening ne…
I would like to address the use of peat as a growing medium in the horticulture industry. The court case in 2019 which removed the exemption from planning permission for peat extraction is having, and will have, a significant impact on the industry. I thank re…
Last month, the CSO published a groundbreaking report marking a significant milestone in addressing sexual violence in Ireland. This report, which is the first of six, sheds a light on the pressing issue of sexual violence in our communities and is the result …
I find it remarkable in this day and age that we have a system whereby every year there is a scramble to find places on school buses and elected representatives of this House and on the local authorities across our country are contacted by concerned parents in…
While I welcome the reviews the Minister referenced, will he indicate the timeline for their completion? I also welcome his comments on the changes in the CAP, which have been well flagged. Under the EIA regulations that are in place, if one is removing a hedg…
In the first instance, I do not think it is a good practice in this House that lies are told about anybody, and lies were told.…
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.