Catherine Connolly
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 | 451 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 135 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 73 | |
| … 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 | 4 | 1 |
| Contradicted their words | 1 | 1 |
Not scored: 62 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 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 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I object to the Order of Business on two counts. I support the Deputies calling for a full debate on vaccination and the decisions being made to discriminate on the roll-out of that and into pubs. I also object in the strongest possible terms that the Finance (Covid-19 and Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill will be allowed one hour's debate tomorrow night. Language means nothing, and if language means nothing, democracy …
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.59) · voted NIL · against their party
I do not have the cluster of amendments in front of me but we are speaking about taking away the right to jury trials. I wished the Minister the very best in his new career but I cannot but go back and read out his speech. I do not know how he is going to get around that, other than by the fact that he now has power or, as has been alluded to already, has been captured by the Department. I do not wish to embarrass hi…
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 | 3,355 | +0.112 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 9 | -0.336 |
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 119 | -0.297 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 53 | -0.108 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 71 | -0.090 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 32 | -0.015 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 69 | +0.027 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 6 | +0.102 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 19 | +0.127 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 48 | +0.182 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 312 | +0.193 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 22 | +0.214 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 18 | +0.230 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 13 | +0.238 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 7 | +0.246 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 108 | +0.284 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 197 | +0.347 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 16 | +0.361 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 22 | +0.405 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 14 | +0.411 |
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.
This is a serious issue. I attended a very civilised protest in Galway a few weeks ago. We were asked to ask the Minister, as a member of a Government which has a place on the UN Security Council, to call on the Islamic Republic of Iran to immediately stop the…
I thank the Minister and I would appreciate the table. This is really about acknowledging what it took to get to this point. The Minister's colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, has read out the names of the people who were victims. To put…
I am acutely conscious of the report yesterday about the prevalence of violence, including sexual violence, in our community. That report comes more than 20 years after the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland, SAVI, report, which told us in no uncertain terms…
I suppose it was too much to hope for the Taoiseach, when announcing he was going to resign, to depart from his written script on an issue of this importance. Thirty-four practising clinicians wrote to the Minister and pointed out that the six-month period was…
I support the call for a debate in this House. As of today, the figures for international protection applicants not offered accommodation is 1,780, which is 65 more than last Friday. I ask for that debate to take place because what is happening in our name is …
One minute cannot do justice to this issue or to those who have suffered as a result of Government decisions and the behaviour of institutions. The Minister is persisting with a cold, calculated scheme that is based on reducing costs. He is excluding all of th…
While I praise the Taoiseach for his initiative and leadership, we stood idly by for a long time in relation to Israel and we are complicit in that. When Amnesty released its report in February 2022 stating that Israel was operating an apartheid regime, there …
Clearly, we are in this position because the processes and procedures on the ground have utterly failed. Indeed, in certain situations, they have added to the distress, the bullying and harassment. The process itself has become an abuse. That is why we are her…
Is féidir breathnú ar aon fhreagra go dtí seo agus bheadh sé mar an gcéanna. Deir an freagra ó Dheireadh Fómhair 2019: “Agus an cás gnó a bheith faofa, is í an céad céim eile sa phróiseas ná tairiscintí a lorg don obair.” Sin in 2019. Is féidir dul siar agus d…
Ceapaim go bhfuil sé tábhachtach an leasú seo a phlé. Níl mé sásta, agus ní raibh riamh, leis an bhfocal “pionós” ó thaobh na Gaeilge de. Tá bealaí éagsúla eile atá i bhfad níos dearfaí chun daoine a mhealladh an Ghaeilge a úsáid. Mar a luaigh an Teachta Ó Sno…
Táim ag díriú isteach ar mhuintir na Palaistíne agus go háirithe ar na daoine atá ina gcónaí ar an mBruach Thiar agus iad faoi ionradh ó arm Iosrael - ionradh fuilteach, mídhleathach atá ar siúl gan aon rud á rá againn in ainneoin gur tír neodrach muid agus go…
The Government is not proactively reviewing this policy. It is reviewing it now because of outrage over the lack of analysis in relation to the damage done by data centres. I fully accept that we need data centres and that they are part of the modern economy. …
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.