Margaret Murphy O'Mahony
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 | 191 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 11 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 6 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 3 |
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 | 2 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 5 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 oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I move amendment No. 1: To delete all words after “That” and substitute the following: “Seanad Éireann declines to give the Bill a second reading for the following reasons: - it would create an unclear basis for an intervention by providing for circumstances where burials are ‘reasonably likely to have taken place’ and for evidence of such burials to include missing burial records, records that indicate an unusually …
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 | 95 | +0.652 | +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 services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 6 | +0.446 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 35 | +0.524 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 14 | +0.626 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 9 | +0.674 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 5 | +0.752 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 7 | +0.800 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 7 | +0.822 |
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.
Scams have been so prevalent lately that many people are losing an awful lot of money. I feel particularly sorry for older people who have obviously saved money and who can lose it so fast. Many older people are losing confidence in life as a result. They are …
I rise today to speak about the issue of road safety, particularly with regard to pedestrianisation. I do not notice it as much at home because the streets obviously are not as busy as they are in Dublin, but the few days I am in Dublin I walk around a lot and…
I sincerely thank the Cathaoirleach for selecting this Commencement matter today. I also thank the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, for coming to the House to take the debate. I rise today to highlight the urgent and ongoing challenges faced by people in I…
I stand here to speak about the worry of the farming community now. There are mixed messages coming from Europe regarding potential changes in the CAP system. The rumour is that Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 structures will be changed. This is money that is totally al…
I rise to welcome the announcement by the Minister, Deputy McEntee, of a commission of investigation into historic sexual abuse in day schools and boarding schools. When one thinks of abuse, one is inclined to think of the homes that were going at the time. Th…
I would not have made it. I tried to plead that, what I lacked in height, I made up for in heart but, unfortunately, my pleas fell on deaf ears. They will never know what they missed.…
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.