Manus Boyle
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 | 144 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 7 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 4 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
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 | 0 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 3 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 2 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
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 | 127 | +0.472 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 9 | +0.062 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 19 | +0.299 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 9 | +0.444 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 42 | +0.485 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 13 | +0.500 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 58 | +0.572 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 10 | +0.576 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 11 | +0.671 |
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.
We will be waiting for you. I raise the issue of defective concrete blocks in Donegal, which has been raised here a couple of times. On behalf of the Fine Gael councillors in Donegal, Jimmy Kavanagh, Martin Harley and Michael Boyle, I express deep concern rega…
I, too, would like to be associated with the condolences to the families. We in Donegal have had our own tragedies down through the years. The loss of five young lives is so sad. It really is. They were going out, just in the prime of their lives. Today, I wan…
I want to raise an issue I feel really strongly about. A couple of weeks ago my daughter fell and I took her to an accident and emergency unit. We arrived at the unit on a Sunday afternoon about 4 o'clock and there was a lady there with severe disabilities. My…
I am very sorry for and pass on my condolences to the family of Sr. Stan. I also congratulate our new President, Catherine Connolly, on her election. I wish to raise the serious issue of Garda staffing and the lack of essential resources in County Donegal. Sev…
I concur with my party colleagues. The Minister needs to reverse this. People are hard pressed the way things are with the cost of living. This really needs to be sorted. Another issue I will take up today is about Irish Water. North Inishowen, Malin and Carnd…
Today I raise the issue of the A5, on which more than 50 people have been killed since 2006. It was a dark day in Donegal yesterday when we heard that the A5 project was not proceeding. Transportation and connectivity are crucial for a big county such as Doneg…
Yesterday morning, I was doing the school run when I turned on Highland Radio and "The Greg Hughes Show", which is very popular, was on. The manager from Donegal Airport was on it. Listening in, it was very worrying and to be honest, the phone has not stopped …
I want to talk about Uisce Éíreann on behalf of Councillor Michael Boyle in south-west Donegal and of myself. This is an issue for the people of Clogher, Leghawny, Copany, Laghey and the surrounding areas and townlands. I have raised this issue in the House be…
I ask that the Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Public Works, OPW, give an update on Bridge Street in Killybegs in County Donegal. The street was flooded in November 2024 and the devastating scenes were seen worldwide. People on Bridge S…
I want to raise the issue of self-employed people when they become sick or unable to work. Over the past few months, I have been contacted by a couple of people in my constituency in County Donegal who have worked all their lives. They are self-employed worker…
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.