Darren O'Rourke
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 | 1,120 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 62 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 27 | |
| … 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 | 4 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 35 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 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 oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I move amendment No. 1: In page 5, line 8, to delete “the transition” and substitute “a just transition”. I am disappointed to see reflected in the Bill that the Government has taken nothing on board from the 12 hours of Committee Stage scrutiny we had on this Bill last week. Some 231 amendments from Opposition politicians were put forward and not only did the Minister refuse to accept any of them, he also failed to …
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support the comments of previous speakers. The commitment to public transport is fundamental to the programme for Government and private operators play a key role in scheduled services, tourism, tours and school transport. It is an important issue. These providers are honest, decent, hard workers and they deserve the full support of the State.…
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 | 1,213 | +0.420 | +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 | 11 | -0.044 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 13 | +0.014 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 17 | +0.104 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 13 | +0.168 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 85 | +0.341 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 5 | +0.344 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 19 | +0.359 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 37 | +0.388 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 50 | +0.430 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 31 | +0.476 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 21 | +0.489 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 8 | +0.508 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 24 | +0.546 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 8 | +0.566 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 53 | +0.616 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 45 | +0.631 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 5 | +0.941 |
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 stand in firm opposition to this destructive legislation. It is the most profound change to the regulation of the private rental sector in a decade and will have a severe impact on renters across the State. At a time when families are already crushed by a co…
I raise the case of the murder of Una Lynskey in 1971 at Porterstown Lane outside Ratoath in County Meath in my constituency. It was the first and oldest case covered in the recent RTÉ "Crimes and Confessions" programme. The case destroyed a number of families…
What I am hearing from the Minister is that he is not happy with the way these changes are being implemented. He said it is not acceptable for the changes to happen in the manner reported but ultimately what I am hearing is that the destination is the same. Th…
The scourge of institutional abuse is a stain on our collective history. As a former Bethany Home resident Patrick Anderson McQuoid is quoted in The Journal yesterday as having said, it is the "shame" of Ireland. It is also shameful that Patrick will be denied…
I raised this issue at our previous session with the Minister and I do so again to have it on record. This is not a reflection on the Minister of State but it is frustrating and disappointing not to have the senior Minister here. In particular, the fact that w…
There is a commitment in the programme for Government on the future of the aviation sector. We are an island nation and the sector is of essential strategic importance but it has been adversely affected by Covid-19. The approach of the industry in response to …
I hope it is introduced but it is a U-turn. A number of months ago when I raised the issue with the Minister, he could not have been more categoric in his opposition to it, despite the fact that at the time taxi drivers right across the country were shouting f…
The Minister of State said he was committed to universal access and that it is crucial. The rest of his response reflects how from this Government and at European level there has been fudge, kicking it down the road and the line in relation to there being no s…
There is a recognised risk associated with a small number of patients attending at Navan hospital. It will probably come as no surprise that the HSE's plan is to make matters worse. In June, 17 consultants at Drogheda wrote to the Minister to state that transf…
I thank the Ceann Comhairle for selecting this important issue for the debate. There are many who will make the case for their local school building project to be progressed. That is understandable but it comes with the risk that all cases are heard at the sam…
I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Sinn Féin motion. I commend Deputy Cullinane on bringing it forward. We have recruitment and retention challenges across our health service, and this Government, like previous ones, has not done enough to address them.…
I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Robert Troy. I want to raise the growing problem of scam phone calls and text messages, which have become widespread in the past few weeks, as he will no doubt be aware. Fraudsters who claim to be from State agencies, for …
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.