Helen McEntee
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 | 729 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 48 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 34 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 11 |
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 | 9 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 14 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 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
On my own amendments and the changes, there were concerns what we were proposing would in some way jeopardise the system that is already in place. As it currently stands, the sharing of information regarding sex offenders travelling into and out of the State is carried out by way of police-to-police information, that is, intelligence information exchange via Interpol. This allows the relevant police forces to manage …
Read as support (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 4: In page 14, between lines 3 and 4, to insert the following: “(3) There may be paid by the Commission such allowances for expenses (if any), incurred by lay members on a panel established under section 46(2) , as the Commission may, with the consent of the Minister and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform,determine.”. The amendment makes provision for the payment of allowances for exp…
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 | 2,132 | +0.591 | +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 | 187 | +0.180 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 404 | +0.475 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 17 | +0.503 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 22 | +0.523 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 11 | +0.610 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 37 | +0.634 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 141 | +0.636 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 50 | +0.762 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 15 | +0.768 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 143 | +0.777 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 7 | +0.844 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 6 | +0.855 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 8 | +0.942 |
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.
Various Bills are amended, whether with regard to assault; non-fatal offences against the person; assault causing harm; assault causing serious harm; threats to kill; coercion; harassment; endangerment; damaging property; threatening, abusive or insulting beha…
We have very different views on this. It is important to remember that a hate crime is a criminal offence, whether it is harassment, assault, vandalism or any other crime. It is a crime aggravated by hatred. An attacker's perception of somebody's gender identi…
More broadly, the Judicial Council is looking at sentencing in general and trying to provide guidelines. It has started this work and is looking at a number of areas, one of which is sexual offences, and is making sure there are guidelines set out for the Judi…
For the purposes of this Bill, there are 12 aggravated offences which can be classified as "hate crimes". These vary from very serious offences like assault to violent public order offences or criminal damage. These offences have been selected as they are the …
The maritime security strategy will ensure that we are taking ownership of what we need to do, but given the vast, expansive maritime domain we are looking at, it is important that we work closely with other colleagues and friends. It is important that we have…
I thank the House for facilitating the taking of his motion today. On Tuesday, the Government approved my request to seek the approval of the Houses of the Oireachtas to opt in to this EU Commission proposal. The proposal seeks to extend the list of EU crimes …
What Senators Ruane and Flynn are proposing is to prohibit the use of devices that are capable of processing using FRT. Under the Data Protection Act 2018, specific primary legislation would be necessary for the use of FRT. This Bill would retain the status qu…
There is a balance with restorative justice and making sure we are focused on trying to reform people, particularly where heinous crimes have been committed. At the same time I believe the punishment should match the crime. This is why I want to give greater d…
I wish to say at the outset that my thoughts are still very much with the young girl and with her carer, both of whom are critically ill in hospital. What happened to those children and that school is an unimaginable tragedy. My thoughts are with them, their f…
Section 14C(2) of the Criminal Evidence Act 1992 provides that where a person is accused of a sexual offence and the alleged adult victim of the offence is to give evidence, "the court may direct that the accused may not personally cross-examine the witness un…
There is work that needs to be done on reporting policy. There is currently a strong focus on the modernisation programme in the Courts Service and one of the biggest challenges in moving to a more digital courts system is the fact the information we have is d…
I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." Although short in length, the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill 2024 is very significant legislation. It addresses important constitutional infirmities in law that were recently identified by the High Court. T…
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.