Gerard P. Craughwell
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 | 273 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 129 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 59 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 12 |
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 | 7 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 4 | 1 |
Not scored: 70 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 (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I will try not to. The IALPA representatives have engaged with us, as have the IAA representatives. To me, IALPA's concerns comprise the premier issue. I want to see its concerns met. The reason I want to see them met is that we have a documented history in this country of pilots making complaints and raising issues of concern, including in respect of health and safety, and of those issues being ignored. We lost four…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
There is a lot I would like to say but as my colleague, Senator Victor Boyhan, pointed out in his various contributions during the passage of the Bill, we are here to give voice to the voiceless. With the permission of the Cathaoirleach, I have been granted permission to read a letter from Sheila O'Byrne into the record of the Seanad. These are her words, not mine: I Sheila O Byrne, who is an Institutional Church and…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.55) · voted NIL · with their party
I wish to deal with all of the amendments together, if I may, given the time we have. Section 323(1)(c) provides that the Secretary General of the Department of Defence shall be an ex officio member of the external oversight body. Section 323(7) states, "The person appointed (or designated under subsection (6)) as chairperson of the External Oversight Body shall not have served [in] the Defence Forces [or any other d…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.45) · voted NIL · against their party
Amendment No. 1 relates to a group elected by their peers as a student union. The Minister might clear up one issue for me. As I know from my trade union days, there is always a risk of fringe groups. I would hope the direction the HEA would give in the establishment of a student union is that it would be all-encompassing and that special interest groups would be encompassed within the union, and I would have no diff…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.30) · voted TA · with their party
I compliment my colleague, Senator Murphy, on his speech and agree with everything he has said. We were promised that, when the schools reopened, there would be no particular problem with substitute teachers, etc. A number of principals of primary schools have contacted me in the past few days about the difficulty in finding substitutes. I was not a primary school teacher so I am not sure how the system works but I u…
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 | 905 | +0.282 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 57 | +0.124 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 10 | +0.149 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 69 | +0.167 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 52 | +0.205 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 449 | +0.318 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 27 | +0.347 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 10 | +0.376 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 23 | +0.387 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 24 | +0.393 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 44 | +0.402 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 35 | +0.428 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 15 | +0.437 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.449 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 14 | +0.461 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 16 | +0.543 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 15 | +0.566 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 6 | +0.642 |
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 am calling for a full investigation into the Irish Prison Service, particularly in the area of bullying and harassment. Some weeks back, I mentioned the case of Sean O'Brien, who was involved in an IRA prison escape in Portlaoise. That man has spent 20 years…
I too recognise the Estonian ambassador visiting here on Estonia day. She has been extremely supportive to me over her term in Ireland, facilitating a number of delegations to Estonia in order that we could put together a vision paper for cybersecurity, which …
Today is the first opportunity I have had to stand in solidarity with the Bosnia-Herzegovina Association of Ireland to commemorate the genocide at Srebrenica, the 30th anniversary of which passed on 29 June. In making that statement, I want to recognise what h…
In fairness to her, the speech the Deputy Leader gave was fantastic. In a recent survey of 6,500 members of the Defence Forces, 58 respondents said they had been subjected to some form of sexual harassment and 40 said they had suffered a sexual assault. We do …
First and foremost, I second Senator Gavan's amendment to the Order of Business. I echo what Senator Black said. She is 100% correct about the Debenhams workers. It always amazes me that when these companies go bust, they walk away and leave behind a trail of …
We have allegations of sexual harassment and abuse in the National Ambulance Service. In such circumstances, where do we strike a balance when it comes to zero tolerance? My belief is that zero tolerance should be the approach in every organisation in the coun…
I second Senator Boyhan's proposal that No. 24, motion 8, on the Order Paper be taken before No. 1. I join colleagues in expressing my deep disappointment with respect to the Finucane murder. It is important to remember that Pat Finucane was the highest profil…
We saw how Ireland's ability to train with other armies around the world benefited us recently in Kabul. When our people went on the ground out there, they knew people on the ground there and were able to interact with them, and that is really important. I agr…
There are two men in Iran today, Behrouz Ehsani and Mehdi Hassani, both of whom are political prisoners, both of whom have been turned down for a judicial review for the third time and both of whom will be executed by the regime in Iran. Iran has murdered 1,10…
We must have a national conversation about those who have decided, for whatever reason, that they do not wish to be vaccinated. The Government must step into the frame and provide the education and information required to deal with this issue of people who are…
The primary function of any State is to provide for the security of its citizens. In this State, we are woefully neglecting our citizens. Dan O'Brien has a piece concerning the spend on defence in this country. We are lowest-spending country in Europe on natio…
I moved from Morse code in high frequency, through to very high frequency and later mobile phones and on to the Internet where we are today. In that short space of time, I have seen how communications have been used as a weapon to pull people into line. I know…
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.