Francis Noel Duffy
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 | 1,100 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 25 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 13 | |
| … 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 | 0 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 12 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 10 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 | 93 | +0.508 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 8 | +0.505 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 5 | +0.545 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 26 | +0.646 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 8 | +0.817 |
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.
The scale of loss of life in the latest events in Israel and Palestine can be difficult for us to comprehend. While we can be shocked, saddened and angered by the massacres, those people unknown to us can, unfortunately, become mere statistics in this terrible…
My second question relates to free legal aid. The pandemic has brought about many unprecedented changes to life in Ireland and nobody has been untouched by the efforts to combat the spread of the disease and flatten the curve. As we settle into our new normal,…
The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 commits Ireland to a legally binding target of climate neutrality or a climate-neutral economy by no later than 2050 and a reduction in emissions of 51% by 2030. The construction and built envi…
I speak on behalf of a group of national school principals who work in some of the most disadvantaged areas in Dublin. They are grateful for the DEIS programme. However, they believe a DEIS plus band is required to assist children in these areas who experience…
I will comment on the Minister of State's remarks. My understanding is that most countries in Europe are moving ahead while Ireland is for some reason stirring a pot with regard to embodied carbon in materials, particularly construction materials. The Dutch ha…
This is very simple. There are two issues involved; the task forces are seriously starved of funding and gardaí are just not doing anything and are letting this situation continue. That needs to be dealt with. Gardaí need to get tough on these guys and move th…
I move amendment No. 20: In page 9, between lines 12 and 13, to insert the following: “ 6. Section 67(1) of the Act of 2004 is amended by the insertion of “subject to section 5(1) of the Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (Covid-19) Act 2020 after “tena…
Section 5(1) provides that a landlord shall not serve notice of termination during the emergency period but does not specify what will happen if the landlord does so. Our amendment provides that any such notice shall be null, void and of no effect.…
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.