Catherine Ardagh
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 | 599 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 26 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 16 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 6 |
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 | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 10 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 | 292 | +0.386 | +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 | 16 | -0.256 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 22 | -0.247 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 5 | -0.034 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 26 | +0.061 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 15 | +0.351 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 7 | +0.369 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 51 | +0.426 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 7 | +0.525 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 18 | +0.591 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 13 | +0.596 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 11 | +0.663 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 11 | +0.670 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 19 | +0.684 |
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 thank Senators who have contributed to the debate. I will address amendment No. 1, which I understand has not been moved. It provides interpretation in respect of the terms "crimes against humanity", "genocide" and "war crime" to be inserted into section 3 o…
I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach for that. I listened with interest from my office to the comments on this Bill, and I thank all Members who contributed to the debate. It is very encouraging to see the level of support across the House and the goodwill towards …
Today is international day for the elimination of violence against women. This is against the backdrop of reports where we have learned that one in eight women suffers violence during pregnancy and that one in five women who are in an intimate relationship suf…
I would like to raise my disappointment at the reconfirmation by AIB that it plans to reduce its workforce by 1,500 people by 2023. Not only is this hugely disappointing for a huge amount of staff but it is also disappointing for people who use AIB's banking s…
I raise the issue of crime on our streets. We have seen a surge since the pandemic of groups of teenagers terrorising people on our streets. There has been a substantial increase in homophobic and xenophobic attacks. Every second day, we see a video go viral o…
I thank the Senators who put this amendment before the House and made contributions today. I understand the genuine questions raised by Senator Higgins. Some were rhetorical and some were genuine, but I understand the point being made. This amendment seeks to …
Amendment No. 16 is a technical amendment to section 10 to delete “in or” and substitute “in, on or” for precision in page 10, line 21. Amendment No. 17 is an amendment to section 10 to delete lines 23 and 24 and align the language with other provisions of the…
I understand and appreciate the point the Senator has made and where these concerns come from. I note and reiterate that the current terrorism framework legislation before the House is not the correct law to address matters that have been raised today. Violati…
November is lung cancer awareness month. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in Ireland yet unlike for breast, bowel and cervical cancers, there is no national screening programme in place. The Marie Keating Foundation recently launched th…
Obviously there are serious consequences. Regarding subsection (c), the proposed requirement for a mandatory non-compliance warning is unnecessary because under section 12, the legal requirement for a notice is satisfied. When the Garda states the precise stat…
Lá lus an chromchinn sona daoibh go léir. It is Daffodil Day today. As my friend said, many of us have been touched with cancer. The Irish Cancer Society does an unbelievable job. When one is brought into the cancer realm, one's whole life changes. One is alwa…
I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Central Bank Act 1942 and prohibit financial service providers from discriminating against survivors of cancer from accessing financial services and to provide for related matters. …
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.