John Cummins
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 | 711 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 117 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 37 | |
| … 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 | 1 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 80 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 | 711 | +0.710 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 15 | +0.493 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 50 | +0.614 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 7 | +0.665 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 15 | +0.666 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 110 | +0.696 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 20 | +0.697 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 132 | +0.725 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 17 | +0.732 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 61 | +0.794 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 21 | +0.801 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 41 | +0.803 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 179 | +0.830 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 24 | +0.849 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 5 | +0.860 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 9 | +0.905 |
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 again raise the issue of a debate on national aviation policy. I have asked five or six times at this stage for the Minister for Transport, Deputy Ryan, or the Minister of State, Deputy Lawless, to come into the House. In light of comments the Minister of St…
I thank the Minister of State for his response. Unfortunately, there are no timelines for the implementation of a more localised approach. Perhaps he could follow up with a written response to me in that regard. While generalised weather warnings might have be…
I wish to make a final point. In his speech on Second Stage, the Minister stated that we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We must use all of the tools at our disposal to resolve the housing crisis that we face. Ideology is not going to fix the …
I thank Senator Scahill for raising this important matter. He also spoke to me about the issue in Castlerea, separate to this Commencement matter. It is a very important issue and I thank him for raising it. The provision of a fire service in its functional ar…
Two weeks ago I expressed my disappointment at the leader of Sinn Féin and of some Opposition Deputies in objecting to 1,592 rental properties in north Dublin. I called out the warped logic that said building 1,592 rental properties, at a time when we have suc…
The Leader is aware that I sought a debate with the Minister for Transport and the Minister of State, Deputy Lawless, on aviation policy. This is the fifth occasion that I have used the Order of Business to seek such a debate. My understanding from the previou…
Since yesterday morning, I have heard people talking about the debate being cut short. However, hours have been wasted on repetitive points and points that have zero relevance to the actual amendments we are discussing.…
He cannot take little bits of it to suit the agenda of the day. I am sure the Minister of State will reply on that. I wanted to make one other point regarding the Senator's original comments. He said he was aware this legislation would be challenged in the cou…
I had not intended coming in but I have to. We had people saying in the earlier debate that we cannot have leasing. Now we are told we cannot have public private partnerships. We do not want to vote for an LDA which will be tasked with providing public housing…
While I agree with what Senator Higgins has said, if we did not have a housing crisis and we had 20 years to ramp up scale, such as was the case in Austria after the Second World War, we could take the points made there and implement them to the letter of the …
I will make one very brief point and ask a question regarding long-term illnesses such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, diabetes and cystic fibrosis. I understand some of those cohorts have been split in two, which has resulted in some confusion…
The Cathaoirleach will give me a little latitude in recognition of the more than 70,000 junior cycle students receiving their results across the country today. I congratulate them, their teachers and their parents. They had a very difficult time over the past …
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.