Marc MacSharry
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 | 261 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 3 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 3 | |
| … 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: 0 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 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 | 140 | +0.371 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 6 | -0.226 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 5 | +0.142 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 29 | +0.415 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 8 | +0.497 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 5 | +0.574 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 5 | +0.725 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 6 | +0.752 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 9 | +0.772 |
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 thank the Minister of State for reading out the reply. I appreciate that she is here, but the reply is an insult. We got a bunch of statistics. The passport service has 900 staff, has received €10 million in extra funding and it is going to be the devil and …
I thank the Ministers of State, Deputies Butler and Feighan, for all of their efforts in respect of mental health. I do not in any way doubt their commitment but, as with all of their predecessors, they are starved of the adequate resources and structures to d…
I pay tribute to the Minister and his efforts in the impossible situation the country has faced. I also wish to criticise every other member of the Government for throwing him under the bus effectively, because he is not getting the support he requires. Deputy…
It seems we are getting ten out of ten for colour schemes but we have an inadequate cancer service. What does the Government plan to do about this, as a matter of urgency?…
The national development plan states: In accordance with balanced regional development, a cancer care network for the Saolta region (West, North West) with a Cancer Centre at Galway University Hospital with appropriate infrastructure will be delivered. Yesterd…
We are failing consultants, doctors, nurses and all our medical professionals through not providing the safe environment they require. They are accountable but through our failure, we are leaving them vulnerable in terms of their accountability and endangering…
As the Taoiseach knows there is a chronic crisis with the cost of living at the moment, much of it brought on by the war in Ukraine and other issues. He will be aware from his party's commitments in the election of another group in society who have been suffer…
Page 114 of the programme for Government refers to the support of our Defence Forces and, in particular, singles out those who have served with pride and distinction overseas. One such corporal, who served in Eritrea, Liberia, Kosovo, Lebanon and other places,…
I wish to make a few points on this important issue. The Minister quoted some statistics. He said numbers have been going down week on week since May. I do not know who compiles these statistics but the lived experience of women is not reflected in them. From …
Do not give me the waffle; I have been around for long enough. It is throwing bad money after bad money for a service that is going down.…
I have been raising the issue of vaccine supply publicly since 2 January and, indeed, privately before that with the Taoiseach. I am glad to see the rest of the Oireachtas is now raising it. I am well used to Governments not listening to me but at this stage w…
I highlighted this matter more than a year and a half ago in the first instance because of the problems it would inevitably cause. Unfortunately, many of those problems have now been realised. As the Minister of State will be aware, those poor people who are f…
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.