Jackie Cahill
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 | 730 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 13 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 11 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 1 |
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 | 1 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 2 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 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 | 275 | +0.326 | +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 | 10 | -0.265 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 13 | +0.167 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 12 | +0.228 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 10 | +0.362 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 11 | +0.387 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 19 | +0.390 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 28 | +0.392 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 47 | +0.483 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.664 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 8 | +0.674 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 8 | +0.921 |
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.
It is the first week of July and an impending fodder crisis is facing the livestock sector. We had an extremely long, wet winter which exhausted all existing fodder supplies. Grass growth for the spring and early summer has been roughly 30% below average. We a…
First of all, I thank the Ceann Comhairle for giving us extra time. I really appreciate it. When I spoke a few minutes ago, I outlined many unanswered questions. The least we owe to Mr. Brennan is to carry out a review of this case. His veterinary surgeon, Tom…
I wish to give a few more examples. A constituent of mine in Dolla recently built a new house. His next door neighbour has full broadband but my constituent was told he is in the amber zone and cannot get connected even though the fibre is only 100 m away. In …
I raise the issue of rural crime in my constituency of Tipperary. Unfortunately, rural crime is starting to increase. There have been a number of highly publicised incidents in the southern part of my constituency. The weekend before last, a constituent of min…
The trespass laws most definitely need to be strengthened and not just in the context of illegal hunting. Anyone found on property who has no right to be there should face far more severe penalties. Rural crime is not the only issue in my county. There are als…
Epidyolex is a cannabis-based medication used to treat particular types of severe seizures. I have been working with a young 14-year-old girl and her family for a long time on enabling her to get access to this life-changing medication. Her father has previous…
I appreciate the Ceann Comhairle selecting this Topical Issue again so soon after the last night we discussed it in the Chamber. On that occasion Deputies Carthy, Fitzmaurice and McGuinness were here with me. We were unanimous on the need for an investigation …
I want to raise the issue of narcolepsy. Following an alleged bad batch of the swine flu vaccine a decade ago, over 90 people have taken claims against the HSE. They claim this bad batch resulted in them developing narcolepsy. Four of them are from my own Coun…
I raise the issue of University Hospital Limerick too. The severe pressure on the hospital from serving the entire mid-west region is evident today. Some 62 patients are lying on trolleys in hospital corridors and management has taken the decision to cancel al…
Turtulla Cross is located just outside my home town of Thurles. It is located on the N62 between Thurles and Horse and Jockey. This junction is extremely dangerous and a number of very serious and even fatal accidents have occurred there in recent years. The i…
I also want to raise the issue of school transport, which Deputy Mattie McGrath referred to earlier, and a family affected by it. Michael O'Brien has a daughter who is 12 years of age and who is recovering from leukaemia. The school bus stops outside her door …
I raise the issue of the HSE removing certain medications from the medical card list. One of my constituents is on Allegron, which is a medication for anxiety and depression. Unfortunately, she began to suffer from her condition due to having had an anaestheti…
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.