Mark Daly
Not yet computed for this member.
The alignment pipeline has not produced a score here. That is usually because this member never spoke in a debate section that went to a division with an attributable question — see the coverage table below.
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 | 2,521 | +0.573 | +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 | 9 | +0.133 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 6 | +0.328 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 50 | +0.562 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 5 | +0.590 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 298 | +0.620 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 18 | +0.620 |
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 5 | +0.664 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 74 | +0.691 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 9 | +0.708 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 14 | +0.717 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 23 | +0.765 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 232 | +0.770 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 5 | +0.811 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 118 | +0.844 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 52 | +0.962 |
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 Senators for raising the important issue of abuse - a number of Senators have done so - and particularly online abuse and the need for it to be tackled, not just for politicians but for all citizens. We are well aware of the issue of bullying in school…
Before I go to the motions that were brought forward at CPP, Seanad Éireann has agreed to observe a minute's silence in remembrance of the 14 people who were killed in Croke Park by the combined forces of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the auxiliary British arm…
I have received notice I have received notice from the following Senators that they propose to raise the following matters: Senator Chris Andrews - The need for the Minister for Rural and Community Development to make a statement on the implementation of an ap…
Before I call on the next speaker, I welcome family members of the Ceann Comhairle, Deputy Verona Murphy. You are most welcome to Seanad Éireann. We also have Linda and Conor McManus, who are part of a group of families of those who were the last prisoners of …
I thank the Senator for his tribute to Brendan Daly who, as he outlined, served not only his constituents but his county and his country at all levels of Government as a Minister, a Deputy, and as a Member of Seanad Éireann. We send our deepest sympathies to a…
I thank the Senator for remembering the men who died in Clonmult. It was the largest loss suffered by the volunteers during the War of Independence and we remember them all on this day in this House.…
The Minister has indicated that he wants to contribute. On behalf of the Seanad, I pass on our sympathies on the death of his mother. It is just over a month since he lost her so suddenly. We express our sympathies to him and all the Ryan family on such a trag…
I thank the proposer of the motion for putting it forward. It is important, not only in terms of loneliness and the mental health issues that stem from that, but also in terms of the other health issues that can be a consequence of loneliness for all age group…
I join the Acting Leader in expressing my support for Janet Horner, Tania Doyle and all those who are campaigning at the moment and are on the receiving end of abuse. When we had a discussion here on the future of local democracy, one of the issues that arose …
Before I call on the Deputy Leader to respond to the Order of Business, yesterday it was suggested, and we discussed it at the Committee on Parliamentary Privileges and Oversight, that we would have a minute's silence in remembrance of Bloody Sunday. On Sunday…
I join the Senator in expressing our sympathies to the families who have, over the last number of hours, gone through the most unimaginable horror to befall any parent, which is the loss of a child. As the Senator has pointed out, it is an unnecessary loss. Th…
I am sure all colleagues were shocked by the sad news this morning of the death of an Irish soldier in the UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon. We extend our sympathies to all the families of those injured and the bereaved. I call on the Leader to outline the Or…
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.