John McGuinness
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 | 432 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 23 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 15 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 2 |
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 | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 8 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
Every case the pipeline flagged, with the contribution it read and the vote as recorded. Judge them yourself — that is the point of showing them rather than only the rate.
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I congratulate you, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, on your election. It was certainly a turn-up for the books that you secured the vote against the odds. I wish you well in your position. I have no doubt from watching you in the Committee of Public Accounts and doing temporary Chair that you will do an excellent and fair job. I congratulate the Ministers on their appointments because this is the first opportunity I have ha…
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 | 426 | +0.307 | +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 | 8 | -0.107 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 7 | +0.187 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 14 | +0.189 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 8 | +0.232 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 80 | +0.235 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 8 | +0.244 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 6 | +0.498 |
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.
There is no doubt that the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, which dealt with the Bill, did a very detailed analysis of it and that most of the recommendations made in its report were taken on board by the Min…
No one wants to see Cara Darmody outside of this House. I agree with Deputy Alan Kelly, who said that the last thing we would expect in a democracy like ours, with an economy that is doing well, is a 14-year-old outside Leinster House campaigning not just for …
The child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, service in counties Carlow and Kilkenny is in such a crisis that it is commonplace now that nine-year-old kids are being brought to accident and emergency departments for attention only to be sedated with…
Last Sunday, I and a number of other public representatives met a large group of parents of children with Down's syndrome. They were frustrated and angry at the lack of general services for their children, particularly speech and language services. They pay fo…
Tá áthas orm a bheith anseo inniu chun Seachtain na Gaeilge a cheiliúradh. Tréimhse iontach atá inti a thugann deis dúinn ár dteanga agus ár gcultúr a chur chun cinn. Is cuid dár n-oidhreacht í an Ghaeilge. Tá sí beo agus bríomhar agus is teanga ár sinsir í. T…
Since 2020, Irish businesses - small and micro - have suffered because of Covid-19, the wars, the cost of living and now the refugee issue. Big Government is ruining small businesses. They complain to me about red tape and bureaucracy and the heavy-handed natu…
The Minister has ignored everything and he has gone with the line from his Department, a line that has caused nothing but trouble for Dan Brennan. The Irish Farmers' Association and the people of Kilkenny are looking on at this and they believe there was somet…
With respect, that is the same reply I received in 2023 and on several occasions prior to that. It is the same as the reply issued on 12 February this year. Will the Minister of State tell Irish Water that 3,300 customers are receiving water that is not just p…
I must now deal with a postponed division relating to Remediation of Dwellings Damaged by the Use of Defective Concrete Blocks (Amendment) Bill 2025, taken on Tuesday, 2 December 2025. On the question, "That the Bill be now read a Second Time", a division was …
I join with all other Members of this House, and indeed those beyond the House, who have expressed their sympathies to Ashling's parents, family, extended family, school community and general community to say how sorry we are that she died in such a way, in su…
That is a fact. The judge, in saying this in the report, is doing nothing else but throwing in information about Shane O'Farrell so that, at the end of the report, he could actually blame him. That is far from the truth and it is far away from what he was aske…
No, that is not the remark the Deputy made. I will not get into an argument with him about it because I know it will just drag on. It was in relation to accusing a member of Government of deliberately misleading the House.…
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.