Conor Murphy
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 | 153 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 26 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 10 | |
| … 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: 16 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 | 117 | +0.459 | +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 | 5 | -0.836 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 17 | +0.007 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 13 | +0.249 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 21 | +0.522 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 7 | +0.529 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 7 | +0.661 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 21 | +0.745 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 16 | +0.819 |
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.
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. We have a number of serious concerns regarding the legislation. While I fully recognise the need for robust and effective laws to deal with real and ongoing threats of terrorism, and the Bill does indeed deal with many of the…
I move amendment No. 15: In page 9, between lines 4 and 5, to insert the following: “Training for purpose of serving in the armed forces of a state engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide 4F. (1) For the purposes of this Part, training in th…
As I said about the previous section of the Bill to which we objected, we have no issue with people getting research and development support. The question is about the level of that support when there is an absence of support for others who badly need it. It i…
I move amendment No. 16: In page 9, between lines 4 and 5, to insert the following: “Recruitment for purpose of serving in the armed forces of a state engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide 4F. For the purposes of this Part, recruitment for…
I move amendment No. 7: In page 5, to delete line 17. This section raises very significant concerns. We only have to look to our near neighbours in Britain to see where issues have arisen with protests. Some time ago, the Minister of State spoke about her own …
My apologies for being late. I accept responsibility for not having moved the first amendment. The series of amendments to this section, in my name and the names of my colleagues, is necessary to lay a foundation for later amendments to define circumstances in…
I move amendment No. 8: In page 5, between lines 21 and 22, to insert the following: “(j) organising or facilitating travel for the purpose of serving in the armed forces of a state engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, (k) providing trai…
I move amendment No. 1: In page 3, to delete lines 26 to 31 and substitute the following: " "infrastructure” means any infrastructure that enables essential facilities and systems of the State to function effectively and includes, but is not limited to— (a) ho…
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.