Eileen Lynch
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 | 171 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 6 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 2 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
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 | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 4 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 | 96 | +0.605 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 6 | +0.322 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 13 | +0.371 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 12 | +0.432 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 5 | +0.544 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 6 | +0.666 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 14 | +0.674 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 14 | +0.676 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 9 | +0.721 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 5 | +0.841 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 12 | +0.882 |
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 thank the Minister of State for being with us today. I raise this Commencement matter to ask why inflammatory bowel disease, IBD, which includes Crohn's and colitis, which are the two most common forms of IBD, remains excluded from the long-term illness sche…
I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. My Commencement matter is about a review of the widow’s pension and the payment of same. There is a massive anomaly in the system when it comes to the payment of the widow’s pension insofar as if someone is in re…
I rise to address an important and prominent issue, which is the issue of the payment of the widow's pension. Unfortunately, a person can become a widow or lose their spouse or cohabiting partner at any age and they then receive this widow's pension based on t…
I thank the Minister of State for his reply. However, it seems to have failed to answer the questions that I raised about the potential impact that this vote passing would have here, but also as to whether there is an Irish position. I take the Minister of Sta…
I thank the Minister of State for taking this matter and I appreciate it does not fall under his remit. I find the reply to be quite disappointing. I know the statistics that all of the local authorities met the 3% target in 2023 in terms of employing people w…
I thank the Minister of State for his reply. I note what he said. It is disappointing, in that the points that have been laid out are largely based on consultation. If that was always actively adhered to, it may have more of an effect. In terms of the consulta…
I wish to address a matter I have raised before, namely, the need to provide ring-fenced funding for transport for those in receipt of adult disability day services. Currently in my county of Cork, there are 242 users of adult disability day services across 25…
It is disingenuous to say the double jeopardy rule applies in this case. I call on the Minister for Social Protection to come to the House to address the matter.…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit agus gabhaim buíochas leis as ucht a bheith anseo linn inniu do Sheachtain - nó coicís - na Gaeilge. Táimid bailithe inniu chun labhairt faoi rud atá fíorthábhachtach dúinn mar mhuintir na hÉireann, is é sin ár dteanga dhúchai…
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.