Damien English
Not yet computed for this member.
The alignment pipeline has not produced a score here. That is usually because this member never spoke in a debate section that went to a division with an attributable question — see the coverage table below.
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 | 501 | +0.753 | +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 services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 6 | +0.192 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 16 | +0.556 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 24 | +0.583 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 8 | +0.610 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 12 | +0.716 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 80 | +0.752 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 7 | +0.768 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 84 | +0.820 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 14 | +0.842 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 8 | +0.842 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 13 | +0.875 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 55 | +0.889 |
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 understand that as part of the report, it will consult. We can check this. It is something we can also do when we get the report. To be clear, the Health and Safety Authority is aware that Covid-19 is a risk in healthcare settings and in other settings also.…
On Report Stage in the Dáil, the Tánaiste accepted an amendment that removed the power of the Minister to reduce the number of statutory sick leave days by regulation. These are consequential, technical amendments made in the Seanad and they reflect the change…
On numerous occasions we have said "No" to the HSE. These proposals are not new. They have changed but over many years we have always said "No" and that the place is not ready for it yet. That conversation is still going on. There is extra capacity in Drogheda…
I will speak on amendments Nos. 6 and 7 first. Both seek to have the three-month emergency period extended to 12 months. We think that is unnecessary. Section 4 makes adequate provision that, should the need arise, the Government can extend the emergency perio…
It is a number of cases. The system is not legally binding. We urge all parties to these cases to honour the recommendations if they can and to follow the advice. That is how it works best. The arrangement has served us well over the last years. In these dispu…
As amendments Nos. 1 and 2 are grouped, I will speak to both amendments. Amendment No. 1 makes a minor but useful change to the Minister’s power to set the number of sick leave days by order. As originally formulated, it would have required the Minister to spe…
I have nothing more to add bar that the Government is responding to this. I listened to Deputy Barry, yesterday and again today, with his call for action. I have listened to the Deputy in the past on other disputes and other issues as well. People who followed…
Every effort is being made to protect workers through the back to work protocols. That is an absolute guarantee. It is likewise in the health service. With regard to the changes and the biological agents regulations, this does not impact the reporting of Covid…
I move: That, pursuant to Standing Order 187, it be an instruction to the Select Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment on the Redundancy Payments (Amendment) Bill 2022, that the Committee has the power to make amendments to the Bill which are outside t…
I have said repeatedly in these Houses that I have no issue with debating facts and having factual conversations. I do not like people who mislead, tell lies or exaggerate positions. It does not help any debate. I will park that now. In those situations in Eur…
There were two points and I will address the first comment first. It is utterly unfair to say officials in my Department are involved in spin. They are not. It is factual to say-----…
Sorry, Chair, can I finish my contribution here? There are GPs saying it is right and GPs saying it is wrong. Let us tease this through. We want to make the right decision. Most of us in here want to do the right thing for health, not for politics. Is the capa…
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.