Dee Ryan
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 | 158 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 3 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 3 | |
| … 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 | 106 | +0.639 | +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 scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 13 | +0.030 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 15 | +0.345 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 5 | +0.444 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 6 | +0.536 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 6 | +0.682 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 16 | +0.776 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 17 | +0.823 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 8 | +0.879 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 5 | +0.923 |
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 echo Senator Conway's call for the publication of that review. We in the mid-west are very eager for it to come out, to see what the recommendations are and for the Minister to take action on it. Actioning it is key. We would like to hear what provisions she…
Last Friday, the family of Scarlett Faulkner brought her remains to St. Munchin's Church in Clancy Strand in Limerick and they said their goodbyes. Tragically, two days later, the body of her brother, Jason Faulkner, was recovered from the Abbey river in Limer…
An tAire Stáit is welcome to the Chamber, and I thank him for coming to take this matter. I raise this matter once more. It is the number one priority for people living in Limerick and a huge concern for people across the mid-west, including in Limerick, Clare…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. It is great to have him in the Chamber and I thank him for coming to discuss the matter I have raised, which is the chronic shortage of accident and emergency capacity in the mid-west. The situation at University Hospital Lim…
Will the Acting Leader please write to the Minister for Health and ask her to come to the Chamber so that we can have a debate on all matters of healthcare? I am particularly interested in receiving an update on the development of the new hospital site at Rahe…
Well said.…
I acknowledge all of the actions the Minister of State listed that Government is taking to drive down the sale of cigarettes but I question whether this measure will achieve that aim. From discussing the issue with other retailers, it seems to me this will be …
I thank the Minister for coming to the House to take this question on the urgent matter of continued and ongoing funding for CCTV cameras in Limerick. The Minister's presence signifies his appreciation of the seriousness of the matter and his commitment to pol…
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.