Ivana Bacik
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 | 996 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 198 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 141 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 27 |
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 | 20 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 7 | 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 will raise an issue I have raised with the Taoiseach previously and which he spoke about earlier, that is, the ongoing failure by the Government to provide adequate accommodation for those who come here seeking refuge and are in the international protection system. I agree with him that it is inhumane and unsustainable to have people camping on the streets or in public parks, but it is failure of Government and the…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support the call for a debate on Ireland joining South Africa in the case against Israel. That is a crucial ask. I will return to that on Questions on Promised Legislation but we need that debate and, if possible, to agree cross-party a motion on Ireland joining South Africa in that case. Can I ask about a Private Member's Bill that we in Labour are putting forward tomorrow evening in the House? The Organisation of…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I mark the sad passing yesterday of Mr. Liam Cahill, the journalist, adviser, author and historian. Yesterday, when visiting Portlaoise, I had the pleasure of meeting with members of the local Money Advice and Budgeting Service, MABS, team in their office. I heard from them how their calls have reached record levels this year and how so many households and individuals are contacting them with serious money issues and…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I thank the Minister of State, Senator Casey and other Senators for engaging on this matter. I acknowledge Senator Casey's good faith and bona fides in respect of it. I did not wish to suggest that workers' rights are not protected in primary legislation. I am very well aware of the wide range of primary legislation that is protective of workers' rights, and we can be proud of that. However, there is an anomaly where…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.75) · voted NIL · with their party
Every day reveals more about the true horror of Jeffrey Epstein's global ring of paedophilia and blackmail. The fallout continues. Yesterday Peter Mandelson was arrested and last week the former Prince Andrew was arrested. On Friday night, on "The Late Late Show", we heard the incredible testimony of Lisa Phillips, a survivor of Epstein. Lisa spoke out with great courage to expose the extraordinary power wielded by t…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.75) · voted NIL · with their party
We heard today that the Cabinet will not approve the updated climate action plan before the Dáil rises for Christmas. I understand the plan is to go to next week’s Cabinet meeting just before Christmas. That means we in opposition will not have the opportunity to scrutinise the plan in a Dáil debate. It means yet another delay in publishing much-needed plans to tackle the climate crisis. The latest update to the curr…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.45) · voted NIL · with their party
A Cheann Comhairle, I welcome your ruling this morning. I welcome the statement by the Government Chief Whip this morning and, in particular, the acknowledgement by the Government that there is a need to ensure clarification in differentiating between Members of the Opposition and the Government. That is the core democratic principle that we, across the Opposition parties and groups, united on yesterday and it is fun…
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 | 1,643 | +0.257 | +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 | 30 | -0.223 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 75 | +0.063 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 40 | +0.111 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 49 | +0.126 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 46 | +0.163 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 36 | +0.360 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 24 | +0.417 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 21 | +0.454 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 76 | +0.502 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 31 | +0.549 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 7 | +0.560 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 12 | +0.570 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 27 | +0.581 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 19 | +0.603 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 126 | +0.620 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 109 | +0.694 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 16 | +0.747 |
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.