Cathal Berry
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 | 525 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 20 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 8 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
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 | 1 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 1 |
Not scored: 12 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 5 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 | +0.698 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 6 | +0.540 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 7 | +0.605 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 29 | +0.631 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 22 | +0.698 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 6 | +0.743 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 85 | +0.759 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 22 | +0.768 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 18 | +0.800 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 6 | +0.828 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 7 | +0.861 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 6 | +0.890 |
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.
It is no secret that we are in the midst of another wave of Covid-19. The peak of that wave is some still distance away. It is also no secret that our hospital system is under severe strain and pressure at the moment. That is being felt by our front-line healt…
I welcome the timely and significant measures that have been introduced by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection to soften the financial blow of this crisis across the country. However, my role here this afternoon is to highlight a particu…
I raise with the Tánaiste today the matter of the deliberate and outrageous ramming of a Garda car in Cherry Orchard on Monday evening, which I utterly condemn. Is it a disadvantaged area? Yes, for sure. Is that an excuse? No. There are plenty of disadvantaged…
I thank the Minister for his reply on housing. If he has not visited the small campus of six houses, perhaps next time he flies out of Baldonnel, he might ask to see it and eyeball it himself. It is an excellent model that could be expanded upon. I agree that …
Good evening, Minister. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I wish it was taking place under different circumstances. I convey my heartfelt sympathies to the Murphy family, the school community in Durrow and the members of the wider…
That is quite a useful response and will provide some measure of reassurance to the hundreds of impacted troops and their families. On a more general note, I take the Minister's point that we want to have young soldiers. We also want to have young gardaí, fire…
For clarity, I wish to emphasise in my final wrap-up that Ireland spends approximately one third of the EU norm on defence. This funding is desperately needed. The Minister referred to the modernisation and reform programme announced only six months ago that h…
I thank the Taoiseach for clarifying that the funding is a grant rather than a loan. That is really important because what we are going through at the moment is not a stand-alone economic crisis; it is a natural disaster that has become an economic crisis. It …
My third question relates to contact tracing. How does the Minister anticipate the contact tracing system working in the next few months? Does he anticipate that the contact tracing app will take over or that the manual contact tracing by telephone will contin…
My big concern is the length of time this process is taking. The Commission on the Defence Forces was established at the end of 2020 and we still do not have an outcome or result. One of the international members of the commission gave some public commentary a…
The House will be aware that I am a big supporter of the Covid-19 vaccination programme, despite all its obvious imperfections. Every Deputy recognises that this is our ticket out of this crisis and that every available resource that the State has at its dispo…
The Minister will agree that the nursing component of the Defence Forces is very important, given its scope of practice and the particular skill set and mindset that nurses bring to proceedings, particularly from an overseas point of view. It would be unusual …
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.