Kathleen Funchion
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 | 558 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 14 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 7 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 4 |
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 | 3 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 7 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 support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
In fairness, the points have been covered by Deputies Bacik, Cairns and Connolly. I want to clarify again that nobody is saying that people should not have a right to register a no-contact preference. It is very important that point is clarified. What we are arguing is how that information then has an impact on the adopted person getting their information. That has been said with regard to people having the right. We…
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 | 396 | +0.356 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | -0.232 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 13 | -0.098 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 5 | -0.055 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 34 | +0.145 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 18 | +0.282 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 14 | +0.453 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 89 | +0.476 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 30 | +0.532 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 5 | +0.595 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 6 | +0.601 |
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 welcome the opportunity to speak on this topic. We have had a number of debates on domestic violence in this Chamber. As we know, there has been a significant increase during Covid, or it has just highlighted it more rather than there being an increase. Dome…
I thank Deputy O'Rourke for tabling the motion. The main focus is on prepay customers. I do not know if the Government, including the Minister, understands the situation those prepay customers are in. First, I believe the prepay situation is a total scam. Most…
It is rare that that is said in this House, but it had to be acknowledged. We have had many discussions on DSGBV. In our first days back this term, it dominated debate. There is a cost of €100,000 for one space but there are only 18 safe houses. Even if just f…
That is fine. They are all related, so the same argument applies. I take on board the point that the argument for not using the word "illegal" is that the person has to prove it was illegal and there might be difficulties in that regard, so I am a bit conflict…
I move: That Dáil Éireann: acknowledges: —that the State failed the women and children who were in Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes and County Homes institutions; —that women and their children were unlawfully separated during their time in these institutions; …
I am conscious that I raised this issue in the last round of questions. I would not be raising it again if I did not feel it was not still an issue. It consistently comes up, not just in my constituency but throughout the country. From Donegal to Cork, people …
The war in Ukraine had only begun a week or two before International Women's Day last year. It is difficult to imagine that a full 12 months on, the war is still raging, with no end in sight. Last year, I started my contribution on International Women's Day by…
All aspects of the housing system are broken. Whether it is first-time buyers trying to save for a house, those who are renting or on a housing list or those who, due to a change of family circumstances, need to move out and try to get a different property, th…
While I understand the Minister's point, if the 30 October deadline is adhered to, it will be the first time a timeline will have been met in this whole scenario. The report should have been published before the Covid pandemic started. Covid should not come in…
I move amendment No. 62: In page 31, between lines 34 and 35, to insert the following: “(3) The Minister shall, within six months of the passing of this Act, prepare and lay before Dáil Eireann a report on the operation of the Mother and Baby Institution Payme…
I welcome the opportunity to speak about the situation currently unfolding in Ukraine and the devastating impact it is having. I will focus on the issue of children. I acknowledge the work done to date by the various Departments and Ministers. I am aware that …
I will focus my response on the NCS and the funding, where children are falling through the cracks. I have raised this with the Minister on a number of occasions and I acknowledge that he came out to meet people at the protest on Tuesday. However, I can give 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.