David Stanton
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 | 675 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 10 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 10 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 1 |
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 | 1 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 0 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 | 640 | +0.493 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 8 | -0.104 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 20 | +0.135 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.186 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 21 | +0.231 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 7 | +0.361 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 56 | +0.377 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 20 | +0.435 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 8 | +0.472 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 6 | +0.487 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 6 | +0.509 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 12 | +0.555 |
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 acknowledge that the Minister and the Minister of State, Deputy Chambers, visited Midleton. Many of the rural roads in question remain virtually impassable. I have driven on them myself and they are in an awful condition. They will require additional funding…
I thank the Minister of State for his response. It is a bit funny because, in one sense, everyone here is responsible and no one is responsible. This issue has moved from the Department of Transport to the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine to the Depa…
This morning, we have seen attacks by land, sea and air on the people of Ukraine. It is unbelievably awful. However, there is another arena of attack, which is cyberspace. Given that we experienced such an attack on our health service in May 2021, what has bee…
I again thank the Minister for her response and acknowledge the Cabinet decision today and all of the work that has been done, but there is more to be done. Hundreds of cars were destroyed beyond use on streets and in garages. One man told me that he could hav…
This question concerns the mental health of farmers. It flows from some recent reports that found that almost one in four farmers was considered to be at risk of suicide, 50% experienced moderate to extreme depression and 40% experienced moderate to extreme st…
I understand these wars are being financed and that very complex financial networks are involved. Has any effort been made by the European Union to investigate these networks and intervene to stop the money driving these wars? The Tánaiste mentioned these were…
I thank the Ceann Comhairle's office for selecting this matter and the Minister of State, Deputy Heydon, for being here. I raised this issue last May with the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan. At the time, he told me the implementation of legislation …
I thank the Minister for his response and acknowledge the work he and his officials are doing at EU and UN level. Much has been done. Reading the reports from Myanmar is horrifying, as the Minister has alluded to. He mentioned the Rohingya. Will he comment on …
Five months ago, we experienced the consequences of climate change in a devastating way in east Cork with Storm Babet, which led to businesses, homes, roads and so on being devastated. I have two questions. First, how much extra funding has the Department prov…
That is nine years later. Why does it take so long to deal with so important and devastating an issue in this country? It will have taken nine years for people to get their act together and put a plan in place. The planning application has to be lodged but we …
I again thank the Tánaiste. One of the issues that is developing there is that people are desperate to leave and they are selling what they have, including property and whatever else. They are mortgaging houses to get out and try to get to Europe and the traff…
Is the Minister happy that the work done to date may be wasted? He is talking about managing budgets. He is now telling me that this may not happen for years without giving any indication. Can he in some way let the people on the route know whether or not thei…
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.