Ged Nash
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 | 1,003 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 102 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 45 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 8 |
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 | 5 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 57 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 opportunity to speak on this resolution for a number of reasons. The Labour Party's position on the resolution brought forward on budget night in respect of the proposal to cut VAT for apartment developers was well rehearsed on that night and on Committee Stage of the Finance Bill a couple of short weeks ago. We sought to make the point on budget night and introduced amendments that were, unfortunately,…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support Deputy Shortall's proposition. We have a progressive tax system, which has been defended under successive Administrations even in the toughest of times. That is something that we, as a country, should be very proud of. However, the reality is that the kinds of changes introduced by the Minister in this Bill see that progressivity fraying at the edges. Looking at the direction of travel and at some of the ar…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.45) · voted NIL · with their party
In my experience, Part 8 has generally worked very well. Certainly, in my experience as a local authority member for 12 years and as someone who is still very much engaged with my old council team in County Louth and east Meath, I cannot recall any particular problems in terms of Part 8, or any element of it representing a logjam for the council providing itself with permission, for want of a better description, to d…
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 | 669 | +0.490 | +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 | 12 | -0.461 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 9 | +0.137 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 11 | +0.202 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 38 | +0.264 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 15 | +0.269 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 9 | +0.330 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 62 | +0.394 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 5 | +0.397 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 24 | +0.422 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 53 | +0.569 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 53 | +0.597 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 52 | +0.603 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 16 | +0.666 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 9 | +0.722 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 7 | +0.766 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 13 | +0.810 |
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 convicted serial sex abuser, Michael Shine, will be released from prison tomorrow. He may have served his prison sentence but there is no end in sight for the survivors. Up to 100 men were expected to receive compensation but a legal dispute between the Me…
I would like to have more time available to discuss this, because I am confounded by that response. Effectively, what the Minister of State is saying is that we have disadvantage but that it is not at the level of concentration required for inclusion in DEIS p…
The impact of the changes the Minister for Health will make to Navan emergency department, ED, or Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda from next Monday will mean that "patients may die". These are not my words. These are only some of the words of 17 hospit…
The first time I ever spoke in this House, I called for justice for the survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of the former surgeon Michael Shine. That was 12 years ago, and the survivors still await justice. Shine is the most prolific paedophile to have stal…
When will the health service recruitment ban be lifted? It is affecting real people, especially the over-75s. It is June, yet, yesterday morning 33 people were on trolleys in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda. That number, unfortunately, has repeated itse…
Undoubtedly it is extremely complex, and I understand that. For the record, while we are talking here, I do not want to identify the company, even though it has been identified in the media, unless undue reputational damage would be done. I understand that an …
This is an outrageous situation and simply cannot go ahead. I am disappointed the Minister, Deputy Donnelly is not here and that is no disrespect to the Minister of State. This is an issue that has been on his desk for many months. The reality is that he simpl…
In 2021, the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, set up a review of the Derelict Sites Act. In my view, the Act is being brought into disrepute on a daily basis. It is a charter for rogue property owners to evade their social responsibilities. Three years on, we…
I move amendment No. 20: In page 8, between lines 5 and 6, to insert the following: “(e) in section 7— (i) in subsection (2), by the deletion in paragraph (h) of “adopt and publish in such manner as it considers appropriate” and the substitution of “subject to…
It was shameful for and unbecoming of someone who delights in telling us he is a former education Minister. It would serve him and the rest of the Government better, and would restore some trust in politics, if he, the Minister and the Minister of State just a…
On behalf of the Labour Party, I express my sincerest condolences to the Amess family and to all of Sir David's colleagues. When I heard this chilling news last Friday, my immediate thought was that it could have been any of us. At the same time David was atta…
It transpires that the single malt tax shelter the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, thought he had closed down in 2018 appears to be still very much open for business. The so-called single malt allowed companies incorporated here to minimise their corporation tax bil…
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.