Jim O'Callaghan
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 | 1,112 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 60 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 21 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 9 |
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 | 6 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 39 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 0.88) · voted NIL · with their party
I too welcome the family of Jennifer Poole. The Ceann Comhairle has identified them individually. I specifically highlight Jason Poole, who has been steadfast in his support for this legislation. That has been hugely important to me in trying to advance this legislation through the Houses of the Oireachtas. I also acknowledge the role played by all colleagues in this House. We are all aware of the background to Jenni…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted TA · with their party
I move amendment No. 14: In page 18, between lines 2 and 3, to insert the following: “Circuit Court identification order 19. The Principal Act is amended by the insertion of the following section after section 44: “45. (1) The Circuit Court (in this section referred to as the ‘court’) shall have jurisdiction to hear and determine an application in accordance with this section. (2) An application shall be made by an a…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.80) · voted TA · with their party
It is not the most significant change that I am going to be introducing as a Minister, to be frank with the Deputy. When we look at it, it is removing juries from the High Court in defamation actions. There is no right. I was listening to Deputy Boyd Barrett, who very carefully used his language. I was waiting for him to say it is a right, and in fairness, he did not - he said it is a principle. It is not a right to …
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 | 1,308 | +0.393 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 6 | -0.185 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 137 | +0.043 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 14 | +0.204 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 7 | +0.320 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 14 | +0.329 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 325 | +0.401 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 29 | +0.507 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 7 | +0.559 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 89 | +0.567 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 31 | +0.692 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 12 | +0.738 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 31 | +0.768 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.851 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 7 | +0.871 |
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.
I thank Deputy O'Flynn for this question and the related Questions Nos. 20 and 22. I recognise the profound and lasting harm caused by offences involving child sexual abuse material, CSAM. What makes this offence particularly pernicious is the fact that when i…
I would like to thank Senators for their engagement on this legislation. We have had terrorist offences legislation in place since 2005. This is updating it to take into account the serious terrorist threat that the State can face. Fortunately it is not as sig…
I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Children Act 2001 to permit the publication or broadcast of details pertaining to a person who has been charged with an offence against a child where that child is deceased, and to …
I do not suggest a register of persons convicted of minor or summary offences, or for other than violent criminal offences. What I suggest arises from the fact that I, like the Minister, recently met Jason Poole, whose sister Jennifer was brutally murdered a y…
I agree with Deputy Coppinger when she says abusers and people responsible for gender-based violence are manipulative. I met Naomi Long last Friday. She is the justice minister for Northern Ireland. She asked me to read the report about Katie Simpson's murder.…
I agree with Senator Ruane. I accept that the increase in population is not the only reason why there has been an increase in the prison population. However, it is not inconsistent of me to say that prison capacity should have kept in line with the population …
The killing of Ashling Murphy was not just a brutal crime that shocked the whole nation. It was also an event that has highlighted the fear that exists among women in our society for their personal safety. The shocking killing of Ashling Murphy has enabled and…
It is instructive to us to look at how the 2005 legislation has operated since it was commenced 20 years ago. Many of the issues the Senator highlighted are contained within the 2005 legislation and we have not seen the types of prosecutions the Senator is con…
I thank both Senators for their amendments and contributions. Both in effect wish to make it a criminal offence if a member of An Garda Síochána or Garda personnel does not carry out biometric analysis in accordance with Part 6A or with the code of practice. T…
I have just come from a meeting of the Oireachtas committee on justice. These amendments, in particular amendment No. 19, seek to introduce various amendments to section 3 of the Bill. I will take the opportunity to address amendment No. 19, for which I thank …
I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." I will share my time with Deputy Devlin, who I believe is to speak for five minutes. I welcome the opportunity to commence the Second Stage debate on the Firearms and Offensive Weapons (Amendment) Bill 2021. F…
The violations of human rights in Russia and the stamping out of political opposition are important because Russia as a country exerts significant influence throughout the world. There are very many other countries around the world which do not comply with the…
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.