Joe O'Brien
Not yet computed for this member.
The alignment pipeline has not produced a score here. That is usually because this member never spoke in a debate section that went to a division with an attributable question — see the coverage table below.
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 | 658 | +0.724 | +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 | 7 | -0.081 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 39 | +0.497 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 18 | +0.546 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 14 | +0.580 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 18 | +0.632 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 5 | +0.695 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 11 | +0.723 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 43 | +0.743 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 36 | +0.820 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 172 | +0.833 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 17 | +0.849 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 24 | +0.870 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 7 | +0.887 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 8 | +0.894 |
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 conflict in Yemen, which is a civil war, has continued for too long, with devastating consequences for the people of Yemen. Ireland supports the call for an immediate ceasefire across Yemen and the negotiation of a sustainable peace agreement under the aus…
I thank the Deputy. I refer to some useful points from the budget, particularly in regard to the Department of Justice. A funding package will be provided to extend legal aid for victims of domestic, sexual and gender-based violence. Expenditure on victim supp…
I chair an interdepartmental group which monitors the implementation of the social inclusion roadmap. We monitor poverty levels. The Deputy will be aware of the at-risk poverty rate, which is the percentage of people with an equivalised disposable income below…
Apologies. I had a look around earlier but did not spot Deputy Catherine Murphy sitting right behind me. As we go forward, we should have a committee session on this where we can hear people talk directly about their experiences. I want to address a couple of …
I move amendment No. 1: In page 5, to delete lines 9 to 11 and substitute the following: “corroborated particulars of death certificates; to amend the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005, the Civil Registration (Amendment) Act 2014 and the Civil Registration…
On the Deputy's question on the Pobal HP deprivation index, this is Ireland's primary social gradient tool used by numerous State agencies for the identification of disadvantage to target resources towards communities most in need. The index is recognised as a…
I move amendment No. 2: In page 12, to delete line 16 and substitute the following: “(a) in subsection (1), by the substitution of “such required particulars of the death concerned as may be specified by an tArd-Chláraitheoir” for “the required particulars of …
I will take a moment to speak about racism. It is racism as opposed to racists that it is important to address. Racism is an everyday fact of life for people of colour in Ireland. It is this way because racism goes unidentified and unchallenged by many of us w…
I thank Senator Maria Byrne for raising this matter. The telephone support allowance, TSA, which was announced in budget 2018 is a weekly payment of €2.50 equating to €130 per year. Approximately 136,000 customers are currently in receipt of the TSA payment. T…
I cannot comment on the Department of Health scheme that covers healthcare workers, as I do not know the ins and outs of it. However, we all agree that healthcare workers faced specific dangers and vulnerabilities that were different from those faced by many o…
I want to push back on the Deputy's assertion that people are being lied to or are being told mistruths and untruths. It is very problematic and, frankly, it feeds the people who are spreading lies. What the Deputy said is simply not true.…
I will answer the last question first. I recall there were significant efforts made by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications in relation to prepay meters. You should not be without the payment if you are on a prepay meter. We can talk a…
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.