John Lahart
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 | 1,045 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 39 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 20 | |
| … 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: 19 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 | 386 | +0.516 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 6 | -0.035 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 10 | +0.106 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 5 | +0.211 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 5 | +0.239 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 12 | +0.414 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 13 | +0.458 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 7 | +0.513 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 70 | +0.514 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 7 | +0.611 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 27 | +0.660 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 6 | +0.700 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 25 | +0.760 |
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 am raising the issue of public transport again. This Government and the previous Government committed heretofore unknown and unseen resources into public transport. What I want to raise may initially sound like the failure of a bus route but it points to a l…
That answer is much less heartening than the Taoiseach's response when I raised the same issue on the Order of Business. It is not enough. That is the very simple message I ask the Minister of State to bring back to the Minister. She might ask him, and his con…
I thank the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, for his presence to take this Topical Issue, which I can probably divide into two parts. The first part seeks to open a proper debate regarding the need for a regulatory body for the construction industry. The s…
Yes. Even there a bit of education is needed because apparently they are not great in every aspect of the garden but are suitable for particular plants. Sometimes I think we are too late. A piecemeal manner of addressing this will not work. If you want to see …
One thing this conflict has in common with what is going on in Gaza is that I cannot think of one single thing that would guarantee intergenerational conflict more than the use, abuse and the taking and maiming of children. It almost guarantees that the memory…
Likewise, I acknowledge the increase in Garda numbers, but what people want to see, which is the age-old challenge, is gardaí on the streets. Be it the area covered by Tallaght Garda station, the area that is in need of a Garda station in Citywest, or Rathfarn…
We did not support it, actually. It was stitched into the programme for Government. I wish we had outlawed SHDs from the start. However, this legislation appears to do it. I was concerned that a Government press release about its legislative programme and what…
I want to reinforce the message from a previous speaker in relation to scrambler legislation. As the Taoiseach knows, I worked particularly hard in opposition, with his support, to draft a Bill around scrambler legislation between 2016 and 2020. In government,…
I thank my colleague, the Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, for appearing in the Chamber to take this Topical Issue matter. I begin with a quote: "He's been an outstanding doctor and the best dad we could have asked for." So said Dr. Samar Fatima A…
I mentioned in my opening remarks that every Department - and I named them - needs to come to the table, to meet the drugs task forces and to make sure that the people who traditionally sat around this table but who have fallen away over the years get back to …
I know the topic of post offices is close to the Tánaiste's heart. Closures of post offices tend to be associated with rural towns and villages but two offices have closed in my constituency of Dublin South-West in the past two years, one in Templeogue village…
So we are not talking about the speed limits in Dublin being reduced to 30 km/h universally. The Minister of State might elaborate on what he has in mind there. The drugs measures, drink driving and penalty points have been mentioned. I did not mention them bu…
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.