Malcolm Noonan
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 | 934 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 52 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 25 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 10 |
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 | 4 | 0 |
Not scored: 27 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. 5: In page 21, to delete line 24 and substitute the following: “ “Act of 2001” means, other than in Chapter 4 of Part 13 , the Local Government Act 2001;”. This is a technical amendment to provide for the amendment of the Valuation Act 2001 in Chapter 4 of Part 13 because the "Act of 2001" has a different meaning in that Chapter in comparison with the rest of the Bill. As regards amendment No. 6,…
Read as support (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I accept the valid points made by the Deputy on community needs and urban regeneration, which is critical. The Valuation Office is engaged in a national revaluation programme, the immediate objective of which is to ensure the first revaluation of commercial and industrial properties in all rating authority areas in over 160 years is conducted across the country as soon as possible and on a phased basis. Substantial p…
Read as support (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I will respond to amendments Nos. 7 and 9 together as they concern the referendum on the public ownership of water infrastructure. Before I do, I will address some of the points raised by the Deputies in terms of the referendum. I share the concerns of Deputy Mattie McGrath in terms of the Shannon project but that is not being addressed here today. From an ecological perspective, I would have concerns about it. In te…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.75) · voted NIL · with their party
My colleague has spoken more broadly on the provisions of the Bill. I will speak specifically to the EU anti-SLAPP directive. While provisions of the Bill give effect to aspects of the EU anti-SLAPP directive, and its application to domestic defamation cases is welcome, it falls short of transposing the directive's full set of minimum standards and protections, which Ireland is legally required to implement in full b…
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 | 1,520 | +0.696 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 7 | +0.069 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 10 | +0.385 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 286 | +0.642 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 18 | +0.702 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 24 | +0.711 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 16 | +0.713 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 155 | +0.717 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 19 | +0.720 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 39 | +0.740 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 19 | +0.746 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 194 | +0.748 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 5 | +0.787 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 9 | +0.811 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 586 | +0.827 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 81 | +0.844 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 69 | +0.874 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 33 | +0.877 |
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.
The Deputy has certainly put forward a very strong case for this type of co-operation. It is important, particularly as we have come through the Covid-19 crisis, which has highlighted significant challenges in rural areas. I am very familiar with that part of …
I absolutely will. It is very important that we do. Another important point is related to Covid-19. The pandemic has presented challenges to the fire services in the delivery of services. Our Department has monitored regular reports from the fire services on t…
There are two issues I want to raise with the Leader. One relates to the potential shelving of the introduction of BER certificates for private rental properties, as reported by Caroline O'Doherty of the Irish Independent . This was a key commitment under Hous…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit agus déanaim comhghairdeas leis. I thank the Civil Engagement Group. I will be supporting this Bill. Yesterday, Senator Cosgrove and I met with Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine. They have been outside Leinster House prot…
As I stated, the first intake of 20 rangers will be deployed in the coming weeks. On the specific issue of responding to particular incidents, yesterday the Minister and I were able to sign off on a memorandum of understanding with An Garda Síochána on tacklin…
Dáil amendment No. 130 inserts “immediate surroundings” into section 148(1)(e). The effect is that the unauthorised possession of detection device in, at, on, over, above, or within the immediate surroundings of a registered monument of a wreck one hundred or …
Section 44 outlines the grounds for complaint under the Act regarding a registered member to the registration body. We must oppose amendments Nos. 30 and 31 to section 44, which seek to provide that failure to comply with building regulations and planning perm…
I am taking this Commencement matter on behalf of the Minister of State at the Department of Transport, Deputy Naughton. The relevant legislation that allows for the removal of abandoned vessels in Irish waters such as that referred to by the Senator is the Me…
I appreciate the issue of defective concrete blocks is a particularly emotive one for households and I sympathise with all who are caught in this distressing situation. It is very worrying for those affected. The issue came to light in 2013 when significant cr…
I visited the Wicklow Mountains National Park this week and I met Wesley Atkinson and Hugh McAlinden, two members of the National Parks and Wildlife Service team the Deputy knows. I witnessed at first hand very significant damage to the habitat there. It was q…
Gabhaim buíochas leis an Seanadóir as ucht an cheist seo a ardú. The provision of a fire service in its functional area, including the establishment and maintenance of a fire brigade, the assessment of fire cover needs and the provision of fire station premise…
I thank the Senator for raising the issue. The Minister, Deputy Ryan, and his Department have not been made aware of any deterioration in the situation regarding abandoned vehicles. However, the Minister and I are of the view that it is important that the enfo…
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.