Joe Conway
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 | 80 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 45 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 15 | |
| … 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 | 0 | 1 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 30 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 | 198 | +0.408 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 13 | +0.108 |
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 13 | +0.156 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 13 | +0.346 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 9 | +0.430 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 5 | +0.473 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 89 | +0.517 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 12 | +0.679 |
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.
The Kremlin does everything it can to claim Russian society is squarely behind Mr. Putin and his war but when one of the Kremlin's leading legal proponents turns on the President, we begin to see fault lines open up under the pressures of war and economic decl…
Unfortunately I was not here for Senator's Ryan's contribution, which I am picking up from subsequent speakers was poignant and harrowing. Agus é sin ráite, tá fadhb agam leis an leasú seo. I have a couple of problems with the language in this amendment. In th…
I wonder if many in the House are familiar with the name Saif Musallet. Unfortunately, that young man’s name has been in the news quite prominently over the past few days, I suspect because he has dual nationality. He is Palestinian but he is also a citizen of…
Back in the days of the autumn past, I spoke on the Order of Business about a serious matter that arose in north Cork relating to fish kill. I see the matter is back in the headlines again this week. It is troubling for the people from that area. It is troubli…
Dar le daoine áirithe le déanaí, ní haon Winston Churchill é an duine atá in 10 Sráid Downing. Más é sin an cás, is cinnte nach aon Franklin Delano Roosevelt é an duine sa Teach Bán. Déanfaidh mé tagairt den ghéarchéim atá ag tarlú san Meánoirthear faoi láthai…
Mar is eol do nach mór gach Seanadóir, chaith mé tréimhse dhá bhliain ar bhord an údaráis. Chuala mé arís agus arís eile an díospóireacht a bhí ann ansin. Níl mé ag ligean amach aon rún anois, ach bhí síordhíospóireacht faoi thithíocht agus na tailte a bhí i s…
I join Senators Wilson and Gallagher in congratulating our new Leader and wishing him all the very best. I wish him very well. I have no doubt he will do extraordinary work for the effectiveness of the House. Cuirfidh mé leis an méid a bhí á rá ag na Seanadóir…
Even though it is over 50 years old, I am sure the Minister of State is well aware of legislation that was enacted in 1972 called the Restrictive Practices Act. I draw particular attention to the Third Schedule, which reads: Any measures, rules, agreements or …
On 26 September, we had a very useful debate in the House in relation to Irish sea fisheries. We all went out that day feeling fairly chipper about the Common Fisheries Policy negotiations that were coming up. Even though the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, …
I move amendment No. 2: After "calls for:", to insert the following paragraph: "- an end to the culture of systemic bullying and sexual violence that has persisted in the Defence Forces and ensuring that reprisals against those who raise these issues is no lon…
Ba mhaith liom aontú leis na rudaí atá ráite cheana. Cuirim fáilte Uí Cheallaigh roimh an Aire Stáit, an Teachta Buttimer, agus é tagtha isteach anseo agus é ag labhairt Gaeilge álainn. Sin a chuala mise ar aon nós. Mar dhuine úr sa Teach seo, táim thar a bhei…
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.