Jennifer Carroll MacNeill
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 | 991 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 35 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 29 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
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 | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 6 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 25 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 | 1,019 | +0.631 | +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 | 9 | +0.109 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 35 | +0.211 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 14 | +0.339 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 11 | +0.352 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 19 | +0.401 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 76 | +0.572 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 55 | +0.674 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 15 | +0.683 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 8 | +0.693 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 8 | +0.699 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 34 | +0.754 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 18 | +0.784 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 40 | +0.788 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 16 | +0.823 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 106 | +0.825 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 21 | +0.866 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 23 | +0.870 |
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.
This is national Traveller Pride Week. There are so many different issues one could raise but a particularly vulnerable group are those Traveller women in prison in Ireland. Traveller women are between 18 and 22 times more likely to be in prison than a non-Tra…
I thank the Minister for sharing his time. It is not acceptable to use children and civilians as human shields, and it is not acceptable to harm and kill them where they are being so used. The Israel Defense Forces, IDF, claimed this week that it is doing ever…
I am not in a position to give that date at the moment but I will try to come back to the Deputy as soon as I can. Very few countries have introduced lung cancer screening because of the uncertainty around its effectiveness. That does not mean we should not ex…
The element of preventative care is crucial from the perspective of diet, lifestyle management and the ways in which people exercise. The gym membership piece is interesting but exercise is available in lots of different ways. I am seeing different forms of co…
The Taoiseach has been the recipient of many good wishes today and I thank him for his support and that of his Government for domestic, sexual and gender-based violence initiatives over the past two and a half years. Unfortunately, the majority of murders in I…
The Commission published notable research after President Von der Leyen's speech in December about the scale of the worrying trend of hate speech and hate crime, in particular the level of hatred manifested against, for example, the Roma community, Jews, Musli…
We are talking about services that go beyond the cancer strategy. The Deputy correctly identified regional gaps that need to be filled by the regions, particularly where they are not meeting their targets or the same standard as other parts of the country. For…
I want to raise the massive elephant in the room relating to the national maternity hospital. I refer to the settlement of a case this week concerning the death of the baby of a couple, which I raise with the permission of their solicitor, on the basis of exce…
It is an acute step-down unit for the larger model 3 and model 4 hospitals in the Cork and Kerry region that accepts patients who still require hospital care but no longer require an acute bed is absolutely critical. I have been looking at its usage. For examp…
I want to take this opportunity to highlight the issue of domestic violence and ask three simple questions of the Minister. I will give some background. I refer to the expansion of the safe intervention units by gardaí, such as the one in Dún Laoghaire, for in…
I wish to raise again the importance of a new relationship and sexual education programme. We know there is a problem with gender violence and domestic abuse in this country and all the advocates for change agree that a relationship and sexual education progra…
There is no question but that the regulatory framework requires updating and modernisation. It is closely linked to the wider implementation of the national oral health policy. Ahead of comprehensive reform, several priority interim amendments have been identi…
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.