Fintan Warfield
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 | 353 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 159 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 46 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 21 |
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 | 17 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 4 | 0 |
Not scored: 113 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 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I welcome the Minister and I thank the Senator Mullen for bringing forward the Bill. It is mind-boggling stuff. There have been some very confusing narratives. There are issues of the barter account, of agents who wield great influence on our public service broadcaster and the tension in the model between the commercial and public service pillars is very much under the spotlight. It is funny. I have referred to Bob Q…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I might add it shows disrespect to the Dáil as well, because how many of them were discussed in that Chamber? Forty-eight amendments were put down on six areas, most of which were not discussed in the Dáil. There was also no outside scrutiny or advice in this regard. We are being asked therefore to consider amendments that the Dáil has not considered. It is a complete joke. I support what Senator Boylan said about th…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 5: In page 4, between lines 35 and 36, to insert the following: “Amendment of section 28 (Ministerial guidelines) of Principal Act 3. Section 28 of the Principal Act (as amended by section 20 of the Planning and Development (Amendment) Act 2018) is amended by the deletion of subsection (1C).”. I welcome the Minister to the House. These two amendments scrap the controversial power the Minister has…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.82) · voted NIL · with their party
I welcome the Minister of State to the House again today. I also welcome the people in the Public Gallery. They are folks from the NYCI, Wexford Comhairle na nÓg and a comrade of mine, James Stokes, a Sinn Féin candidate in Newbridge in County Kildare, who is 18 years of age and has come to the Seanad to witness this debate. This is a very interesting debate, which we have had many times here in this House. To be hon…
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 | 682 | +0.398 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 7 | +0.122 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 16 | +0.209 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 77 | +0.235 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 14 | +0.271 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 25 | +0.282 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 28 | +0.341 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 9 | +0.355 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 27 | +0.362 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 15 | +0.447 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 141 | +0.450 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 27 | +0.467 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 43 | +0.550 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 18 | +0.565 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 14 | +0.581 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 60 | +0.587 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 24 | +0.657 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 36 | +0.672 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 16 | +0.714 |
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 welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, back to the Seanad. I thank Fine Gael for bringing forward this very important motion. Cancer is the leading cause of death in Ireland. It is a sobering fact that one in two people will develop it in their lives. …
I apologise that I must leave the Order of Business early. The Government has once again demonstrated that it is unwilling or unable to deal with the housing crisis. This weekend, a Government memo confirmed a housing budget underspend of almost €500 million s…
The University College Dublin, UCD, students’ union released a report on student accommodation. It not only highlights the housing crisis that students and their families are facing but also the measures that can be taken by the Government in the upcoming budg…
A total of 57 tonnes of weapons have been transported through Irish airspace on its way to Israel without clearance from the State. What is the Government doing to challenge Israel and its collaborators regarding this illegal use of sovereign airspace? Irish a…
I also want to raise the situation in Gaza and Israel. The situation has obviously become so dangerous, it is necessary for us to schedule time to discuss the hostilities there. A decisive international intervention is needed to end the hostilities and bring a…
Sinn Féin raised a number of flaws in this legislation in the last term, especially in the hate speech elements, as it proceeded through both Houses of the Oireachtas. These concerns included the definitions of "hate" and "hatred", or lack thereof, and still r…
I thought Senator McDowell was going to call for squatters' rights as a means to address the crisis in vacancy and the housing crisis but that would not track with his ideology. I thank the Labour Party Senators and I welcome former Senator, Billy Lawless. He …
I join others in extending my thoughts to those who were injured at Parnell Square and wish them a speedy recovery. We send every blessing to them. What happened in the aftermath of these horrific attacks was a disgrace. There were burnt-out cars, buses and a …
Fine Gael gives tax breaks to real estate investment trusts and the biggest landlords in this State yet Members come in here and claim to stand up for small landlords of whom most pay over 50% on rental incomes. So I am not going to listen to either Fine Gael …
I strongly criticise the decision of the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Foley, to delay the issuing of the results of the leaving certificate until 7 September. It was supposed to be mid-August. Students have been left high and dry as the Department…
I risk being slightly repetitive. As Women's Aid noted, during the Second Stage debate in the Seanad, the Minister stated the Government is looking at parity of pay for domestic violence leave with sick pay. As my Labour Party colleague just pointed out, the p…
I refer to amendments Nos. 3 and 4. Essentially, they propose that rent increases should be zero. Renters cannot take any more. Senator Sherlock mentioned the darker and more dysfunctional parts of the rental market, but even if a landlord is sticking to the r…
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.