◎ OireachtasDB

← Eoin Ó Broin

Rhetoric and votes

Eoin Ó Broin

Experimental measure. Read the method before quoting a number.
This compares the position a member expressed in a debate with the way they voted in the division that debate produced. It is not a measure of honesty. A member who argues against a Bill and then votes against it scores as aligned; so does one who never departs from a party line they also argue for. Voting against your own stated view under a party whip is ordinary parliamentary behaviour, which is why the whip breakdown below sits next to the headline rather than underneath it. Full method and validation →
—
only 9 scorable votes — below the 10 needed for an interval worth printing
100%
voted with their own party's majority · 1,399 votes

Why the denominator is small

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 cast1,413
… spoke in that debate section92
… vote tied to a specific question38
… position stated clearly enough to score9

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.

Alignment against the whip

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 partyVoted against own party
Matched their words 6 0
Contradicted their words 3 0

Not scored: 54 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 3 where no clear position was stated in the debate.

Where the words and the vote diverge

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.

2021-07-08 · Affordable Housing Bill 2021 [Seanad]: Committee and Remaining Stages · Question put: · Carried

Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party

I will respond first to the comments of Deputy Matthews, the chairman of our committee. These amendments would not stop private investment in any housing project. It would stop a particular type of developer-led development, exactly as the Minister said. It would stop PPPs and joint ventures. Almost of all of the AHB sector, for example, is financed either directly by private finance from banks or with private financ…

Full contribution → · The division →

2023-03-29 · Confidence in Government: Motion · Question put: · Carried

Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party

In two-and-a-half years house prices have increased by 20%. Home ownership is now more difficult than at any other time in decades. Rents in the private rental sector have increased by a staggering 23%. That means that renting is more expensive than ever before. The Taoiseach, for the second day in a row, has claimed there were 50,000 new tenancies registered with the Residential Tenancies Board last year. That is no…

Full contribution → · The division →

2020-07-30 · Residential Tenancies and Valuation Bill 2020: Committee and Remaining Stages · Question put: · Carried

Read as support (cue, confidence 0.45) · voted NIL · with their party

I support Social Democrats' amendment, but I also wish to speak to amendments Nos. 9, 11 to 13, inclusive, 37 and 38, all of which are mine. This cluster of amendments does something very similar to the amendment moved by Deputy O'Callaghan, albeit in a slightly more elaborate way. While the first amendment is probably the simplest amendment that I have tabled to this Bill, what it seeks to do is very profound, which…

Full contribution → · The division →

Tone

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.

ModelSpeeches scored Mean valenceCorpus mean
vader974 +0.192 +0.423

Which policies move them

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.

TopicSpeechesMean valence
Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase 31 +0.075
Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable 231 +0.103
Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish 12 +0.182
Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme 27 +0.386
Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information 127 +0.400
Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does 92 +0.427
Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community 13 +0.444
Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture 13 +0.572
Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance 7 +0.619
Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families 7 +0.625

The whip, across the whole corpus

Alignment by the party a member sat for on the day, with 95% Wilson intervals. This is the test the measure could have failed.

PartyAligned95% 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.

How the scorer scores

Two automated methods were built and both failed. What survives is the rule-based layer, which is why the coverage above is narrow.

MethodAccuracy95% 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.

Method

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.