Lynn Boylan
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 | 321 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 82 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 39 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 6 |
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 | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 43 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 (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 59: In page 57, between lines 18 and 19, to insert the following:“(12A) The Minister shall, within six months of the passing of this Act,commission and publish a report on the regulatory and legislative changes required in order to establish an online portal for the uploading of dash cam and helmet camera footage to aid in the investigation and prosecution of road traffic offences.”. I propose to…
Read as support (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 11: In page 35, between lines 16 and 17, to insert the following: “(viii) any additional information specified in Annex IV of Directive No. 2011/92/EU relevant to the specific characteristics of the abstraction (a particular project or type of project) and to the environmental features likely to be affected,”. This comes on the back of concerns raised by An Taisce, which noted that the definition…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I send thoughts and solidarity to the people of Rafah. The images that are coming out of the place at the moment are beyond horrific. The decision by the Irish, Spanish and Norwegian Governments to recognise the State of Palestine was the first ray of hope for the people of Palestine, Israel and the rest of the world who seek a long-lasting peace and just outcome to the horrific nine-month-old war. As I was coming in…
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 | 725 | +0.286 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 15 | -0.138 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 8 | -0.137 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 29 | -0.059 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 20 | +0.012 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 25 | +0.151 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 19 | +0.216 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 5 | +0.225 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 33 | +0.239 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 20 | +0.275 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 29 | +0.305 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 67 | +0.386 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 14 | +0.386 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 69 | +0.399 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 101 | +0.458 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 145 | +0.462 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 23 | +0.494 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 29 | +0.526 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 10 | +0.591 |
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.
It will be no surprise that I will raise the matter of the announcement that the eviction ban will not be extended. Many families, including pensioners and young people, found the safety net had been ripped from under them when they woke up this morning. Peopl…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I am raising the issue of rodenticide poisoning of raptors, particularly barn owls. Our bird populations are collapsing due to habitat loss but also as a result of deliberate and accidental poisoning. There is no need to tell…
Yes. The Minister of State's response is deeply disappointing. Senator Higgins has made a very strong argument in favour of our amendments. On the one hand we are using low usage as a metric in the context of a low-usage charge but at the same time, it is not …
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. The Minister and I have just left Tallaght, where we were in the company of the formidable Muslim Sisters of Éire, a fantastic group of women who are getting on with the business of plugging the gaps in society. I used the opportun…
I will speak about health infrastructure in Gaza but I also want to make a point on the seemingly increasing trend of elected representatives making veiled threats to public bodies with regard to their funding. It is not a good look for any democratically elec…
I welcome the Minister to House. I am delighted he has come here and has made such a strong statement in support of this motion. I also welcome Mr. John Finucane, MP, to the House and send our solidarity to his mother who is watching tonight. As my colleague, …
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit, an Seanadóir Hackett. I raise this issue on the back of reports we heard in the media of several raptors having been found poisoned in the midlands, particularly the white-tailed eagle found dead between Lough Ramar in County…
I would like to raise the issue of Dublin Fire Brigade, whose firefighters and ambulance crew are currently at risk of exhaustion due to staff shortages. In fact, twice in the past ten days Dublin Fire Brigade was called to my road. In one instance it was for …
I support Senator Craughwell's proposal to suspend the debate because the contents of the circulated letter are deeply concerning. I am a member of the transport committee and one of the amendments being sought by IALPA relates to licence holders' forums and t…
I move amendment No. 12: In page 18, to delete line 25 and substitute the following: “(b) involved a serious infringement and not minor in nature giving due regard to all of the facts of the case, and". Amendments Nos. 12 and 13, which will be discussed later,…
I echo the recommendation that everyone visits the Rediscovery Centre. When I worked in Global Action Plan in Ballymun, I worked closely with Dr. Miller and the Rediscovery Centre. It is an incredible resource. I was going to say I was happy the Minister of St…
I would like to respond because as I said, we are not opposed to a penalty points system. The Minister makes the comparison with the road traffic penalty points system, but my understanding is that if you appeal the penalty points in the court, you are allowed…
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.