Joe McHugh
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 | 597 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 6 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 3 | |
| … 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 | 0 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 3 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 2 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 | 205 | +0.559 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 18 | +0.356 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 18 | +0.601 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 53 | +0.653 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 26 | +0.660 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 88 | +0.710 |
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.
Táimid ag labhairt faoi leasuithe Uimh. 21 agus 114 agus faoin chothromaíocht atá i gceist don Ghaeilge in aon bhileog ar nós ábhair mhargaíochta mar shampla. Táim ag smaoineamh faoi bhileog a d'eisigh An Post agus bhí trí leathanaigh as Béarla ann agus leatha…
Gabhaim comhghairdeas agus aitheantas chuig an gCeann Comhairle fá choinne a éachta agus iarrachta thar na blianta ina ról an Ghaeilge a bhogadh ar aghaidh agus fá choinne an spreagtha a rinne sé agus an jab atá déanta aige thar na blianta. Tá sé sin tábhachta…
If we are getting applications in towards the end of 2020, we are looking at 2021. I will not give a time, but that is not being overly ambitious because 2021 is 12 months to run then and we will keep the momentum going there. I feel the Deputy's pain on the r…
This is an incredibly important issue. Like the Deputy, I am getting a lot of direct contact, primarily from students but from some parents as well. There is much stress and anxiety. There is the shock that people are dealing with but there is also the shock o…
Again, that is one of the questions to be explored by the working group. The group will be very busy. It will be meeting formally twice a week but there will be a constant conversation in between. Again, we are not - and, as Minister for Education and Skills, …
It is my understanding that NPHET met this week to discuss the issue of Covid numbers in County Donegal. It is really important that its research and insight are given to the community. People in the county are working hard. Our businesses and restaurants are …
I thank the Minister of State for that response. Looking within that script and from listening to the feedback, there seems to be pathway. The issue at the moment, however, is that there is a communication deficit. That is where the difficulty lies. Going back…
Níl mé cinnte go bhfuil mé sásta leis an bhfreagra faoi leasú Uimh. 14. B’fhéidir go mbeidh an tAire Stáit in ann dul ar ais agus ag amharc arís air. Bheadh áthas orm dá mbeadh sé ag dul ar ais sa Seanad agus breathnú arís ar an bhfoireann shinsearach sna comh…
I am reluctant to give a picture of what this is going to look like because we are not announcing it formally until next week. I am going to bring a memorandum to Cabinet and we are going to publish the guidelines. I will offer two examples in terms of disadva…
I thank the Minister of State for coming here this evening. In 2020, a husband and wife started the process of assessing their house, which they knew at the time had defective blocks. One year later, the young woman - a wife and a mother to three children - sa…
Tá fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. This issue is posing a number of problems on a number of fronts in that a licensed road haulier operator requires a designated qualified transport manager. The legitimate and hard-working hauliers have had such managers in situ a…
There are leaving certificate students listening to that. It is wrong that the Deputy is peddling that because exceptional students, whether in a community school, a DEIS school or a private school, will not be discriminated against because it is an all-school…
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.