James Lawless
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 | 1,000 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 20 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 16 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 3 |
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 | 2 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 4 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 oppose (cue, confidence 0.80) · voted TA · with their party
Tomorrow, we will see the threats becoming real. In this House, we watched aghast as Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers prorogued parliament, when they suspended the people's assembly, denying that parliamentary procedure could take place. We watched in horror on 6 January 2021 when the Capitol rioters stormed Washington DC to stop the election results being ratified. We never thought we would see it in this House. We …
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 | 613 | +0.682 | +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 | 6 | +0.263 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 5 | +0.480 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 50 | +0.499 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 20 | +0.626 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 31 | +0.743 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 8 | +0.758 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 41 | +0.849 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 5 | +0.981 |
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.
Freagróidh mé an cheist i nGaeilge, ach ós rud é nach bhfuil mo chuid Gaeilge chomh láidir is atá Gaeilge an Teachta Connolly, freagróidh mé aon cheist bhreise i mBéarla. Is prionsabal bunúsach inár gcóras oideachais é go bhfuil leibhéal ard neamhspleáchais ag…
Tomorrow, we will see the threats becoming real. In this House, we watched aghast as Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers prorogued parliament, when they suspended the people's assembly, denying that parliamentary procedure could take place. We watched in horror o…
My daughter also commutes to college and I would prefer if she did not have to commute such a distance. I see at first hand that it can detract from quality of life. I have met student unions, most recently the union in Maynooth, and have heard that message co…
We stand on a precipice. The world is burning and the barbarians are at the gate. We face multiple existential crises. We have instability in the Middle East, war in Ukraine and climate change. Trade wars will start tomorrow, with tariffs posing threats to the…
Gabhaim buíochas leis an Teachta Ó Snodaigh agus leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach as ucht na ceiste seo. Freagróidh mé i nGaeilge í, ach ós rud é nach bhfuil mo chuid Gaeilge chomh láidir le Gaeilge an Teachta Ó Snodaigh, rud a bhfuilim ag obair go dian air ch…
I ask the Tánaiste about the establishment of an international centre for the prosecution of the crime of aggression, with a particular focus on Ukraine and Russian activities there, and the suggestion that has been made by Eurojust that such a body be establi…
I am glad to hear the Minister's response and it is worth traversing some of those events. In St. Petersburg, not only did we see multiple buses coaching people who in many cases were unidentified to polling stations but we had the phenomenon of doppelganger c…
As its own recently resigned member, David McGinn, said recently, it is a fundamentally unserious party. Those are not my words, but his. This is a serious crisis and we need serious players. The Government provides that seriousness.…
I was aware that there were efforts afoot at OECD level and, to a certain extent, at EU level in that regard. I understand EU officials have stated they will seek to press ahead with proposals for a digital tax on technology companies at the end of the year if…
Across the floor, we see three groups. We see the "Shout 'em down Shinners", yet again agitating, barracking anybody or anything that stands in their way. I fundamentally believe they cannot accept the outcome of the election. They could not accept the outcome…
I send my sympathies to the families of Kim Damti and Emily Hand, as the Tánaiste did at the start of this debate and my colleagues the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, and Deputy Phelan also did. I agree with much, although perhaps not all, of what Deputy Phe…
I thank the Tánaiste. It is encouraging to hear that progress is being made internationally and that many partners are working with us and others to advance that. Continued Russian aggression is a concern, primarily in Ukraine but also, as the Tánaiste referen…
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.