Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire
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 | 870 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 43 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 29 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 3 |
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 | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 14 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 support (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted NIL · with their party
I do not understand the Department's objection to this because it seems to be a departure from prior policy. Apart from the fact that predecessors of the pension board would have had representatives in this arena, the fiduciary duties and responsibility to a board are a red herring. Ultimately, once anyone who is nominated by an appropriate nominating body goes on a board, their responsibilities when they are in that…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
Mar is eol don Taoiseach, bhí scéal ann i dtaobh míle leanbh i gConamara a chaill amach ar bhéilí scoile de bharr gur tharraing an comhlacht a bhí ag soláthar na mbéilí amach. The Taoiseach may be aware that in Connemara recently, 1,000 children lost their school meals because the provider ceased to provide them, citing financial pressures. This problem is spreading. It has become clear that there are problems with t…
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 | 1,016 | +0.312 | +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 | 19 | -0.073 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 36 | -0.057 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 13 | +0.105 |
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 15 | +0.113 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 16 | +0.227 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 13 | +0.280 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 33 | +0.282 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 13 | +0.317 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 27 | +0.322 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 29 | +0.338 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 14 | +0.397 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 86 | +0.418 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 114 | +0.431 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 22 | +0.469 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 24 | +0.500 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 18 | +0.607 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 5 | +0.732 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 10 | +0.735 |
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.
Ba mhaith liom tréaslú leo siúd a ghlac páirt sa tuarascáil seo. The men and women who took part in this survey, difficult and all as it may have been, did us all a huge service because we have for some time been trying to grapple with the scale and frequency …
I am sharing time with Deputies Buckley and O’Rourke. Last week the European Court of Justice found that the Marine Casualty Investigation Board is not adequately independent and gave costs against the State. Any decision of the European Court of Justice that …
The Taoiseach will be aware that Heba Muraisi is now on the 72nd day of her hunger strike in New Hall prison in Britain. Two more people have been on strike for more than 50 days so they could die any day. They are very much in that lethal period. Ms Muraisi h…
In September, an "RTÉ Investigates" programme concerning the disposal of perinatal organs at Cork University Maternity Hospital drew outrage and caused untold hurt to the families involved. These are all families who lost babies in tragic circumstances and who…
The Minister of State and I have spoken on a number of occasions in relation to the terrible situation in Sudan, which has seen tens if not hundreds of thousands of people killed, or certainly hundreds of thousands of people killed, in the past number of years…
More than 13,000 children are among the 31,000 people killed in Gaza in a little over five months, with 72,000 people injured. Having completely exhausted food supplies and coping capacities, more than 1 million people are struggling with catastrophic hunger a…
The Government's digital framework strategy commits to build a strong well-resourced network of regulators to oversee and enforce digital regulation which must ensure the safety of all. Fáiltím go bhfuil admhaithe sa straitéis seo go gcuirfear le chéile coimis…
When I raised this with the Minister previously many of these parents were anxious. Part of the difficulty here relates to how broad the high-risk category is. The very high-risk category is extreme and specific and obviously there are particular provisions fo…
Níl agam ach tréimhse ghairid. Táimid ag déileáil leis an mBille seo 17 bliain ar aghaidh ón Acht agus an scéim a bhí ann ó thaobh na scéimeanna teanga. Bhí sé i gceist go mbeadh a scéim féin ag gach eagraíocht pobal. Go minic, cuireadh scéim amháin ar fáil, d…
The Government's political strategy with regard to the housing crisis consists of two things that I believe are not true, the first of which is that we have got this under control and things are getting better. By any metric, that is not true. House prices are…
There are 84 people on trolleys in Cork University Hospital today. The INMO has described this as "dangerous levels of overcrowding", the highest ever that have occurred in the State. Many of these people are likely to be quite sick and elderly. I know the Tao…
I appreciate the Minister of State's comments and agree with him. It is an extraordinarily severe humanitarian situation. People are facing starvation and dying for lack of food and medicine, while the conflict carries on unabated. This is being exacerbated by…
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.