Laura Harmon
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 | 172 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 67 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 30 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 8 |
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 | 6 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 37 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 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
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. As I am conscious that we may have a guillotine at 6 p.m., it is important that we try to get to all the amendments, if possible. I intend to move amendments Nos. 28 to 30, inclusive, and No. 32. From the outset, I am proud of the Labour Party's efforts in relation to this and the counselling notes piece. Ultimately, personally and from a party perspective, we are against counselling note…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.32) · voted TA · with their party
I thank the Minister of State for engaging in this debate. Where do we even start with this Bill? We put down sensible amendments in the Dáil from the Labour Party. We are bringing them to the Seanad now as well. I am sure they will not be supported by the Government. We have called for this legislation to be scrapped. We simply do not believe that it supports renters. We do not believe it will work. It sides with bi…
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 | 192 | +0.451 | +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 | 10 | -0.107 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 7 | -0.063 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 9 | +0.207 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 21 | +0.217 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 7 | +0.264 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 11 | +0.264 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 11 | +0.352 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 7 | +0.403 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 25 | +0.467 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 17 | +0.567 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 9 | +0.617 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 21 | +0.661 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 6 | +0.732 |
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 want to start by talking about how the world is seen through the eyes of a child. This was very illuminating to me recently. I was doing some school visits in Cork and visited a primary school in Crosshaven, where I spoke to some girls. I always ask pupils w…
I I wanted to put on the record why I oppose the Bill. While it contains good measures, from my perspective and that of the Labour Party, we believe that anyone who spent so much as a minute in one of these institutions should be able to access redress, and th…
I want to raise serious concerns today after watching "Prime Time" last night, on which a student in UCD was interviewed anonymously. This student was assaulted. Later, images surfaced of this assault and of her in a very vulnerable, unconscious, assaulted sta…
I move amendment No. 15: In page 16, to delete lines 32 to 35. I will speak to amendment Nos. 15 and 17. Amendment No. 15 proposes the deletion of the definition of "mental disorder" from the Bill. From consultations with people with lived experience, the term…
I thank the Civil Engagement Group for its work in bringing forward this important Bill. It has the full support of the Labour Party and the Cross-Party Group in the Seanad. It is a Bill that deals with what is fast becoming one of the most pressing issues of …
I condemn what is happening in the Middle East and the actions of the US and Israel. It is a failing of the Government that it was not able to condemn the attacks that happened over the weekend. We have a responsibility as a State to be clear on where we stand…
Some 19,000 women and children passed through Bessborough in Cork when it operated as a mother and baby home. It only closed in 1998. This is part of our very recent history in Ireland. It is part of our past, it is part of our present and it is certainly part…
I raise the issue of cancer care in Ireland. This morning, it was extremely alarming to hear that 80% of the radiation therapy machines in the country need to be replaced within the next few years. Cork is an outlier here. We heard from Professor Aisling Barry…
We are an ageing population, as has been mentioned. The population is projected to grow by 800,000 by 2040 with an extra half a million people over 65 by that point. I have been really struck in the community in Cork South Central by the older people I have me…
Is as Baile Bhuirne mé ó dhúchas i gContae Chorcaí ach tá mé i mo chónaí i gcathair Chorcaí. Rinne mé mo bhunoideachas agus mo mheánoideachas trí Ghaeilge. Fós, caithfidh mé cleachtadh a dhéanamh. Tá mo Ghaeilge saghas meirgí. Tá mé an-bhródúil as m'áit dhúcha…
I move amendment No. 234. In page 128, between lines 21 and 22, to insert the following: “Review of Complaints Procedures 130. (1) Within 6 months of the passing of this Act, the Minister shall request the Commission to conduct a review of: (a) the procedures …
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.