Mark Duffy
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 | 186 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 14 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 9 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 2 |
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 | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 5 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 | 177 | +0.754 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 13 | +0.382 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 9 | +0.442 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 14 | +0.720 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 47 | +0.781 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 8 | +0.841 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 33 | +0.856 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 11 | +0.863 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 7 | +0.955 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 10 | +0.968 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 6 | +0.985 |
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.
Today I want to highlight the desperate need for improved ambulance services and resources in County Mayo and, in particular, the Erris region. It is something I highlighted about this time last year. At the time there were some notable improvements after it w…
I raise the total scandal of Eir and the lack of customer support being afforded to customers throughout the country, but in particular in my constituency of County Mayo. We have examples of customers of Eir who are out of connection since Storm Darragh on 12 …
I first offer my vote of sympathy to the family of Grace Lynch on her tragic passing and to all my Fianna Fáil colleagues on the passing of former Senator and MEP Brian Crowley. I offer my condolences. Last week, after a positive week of housing developments i…
The people of the nation are hurting. Over the past number of weeks in every community, town and village, the protests and demonstrations have reflected huge frustration and anger across the community. It has left a sour taste this afternoon in the Seanad and …
I raise an issue relating to housing. We see across the country the housing crisis that faces the State for so many different reasons. There are many potential ways to help to unlock housing supply. Many people, in particular young couples, are priced out of t…
I offer my condolences to the Minister of State on his sad loss. It is a testament to him that he is back here so soon after such a difficult loss. My sympathies are with him. I raise an issue relating to the tenant in situ scheme, which is a very good scheme …
I acknowledge Members across the floor for putting forward this Bill. I know it is very well intentioned. I do not want to sound patronising but obviously, I support the Minister of State and the Government in terms of the practical reality of its implementati…
I raise a matter that has been, politically, incredibly pressing over the past number of years in counties Mayo, Donegal and Sligo. That is the issue of defective concrete blocks. In my home county of Mayo hundreds of homeowners are affected. It has been the s…
This matter kind of explains itself. I thank the Minister of State for being here. The ask is that Mounjaro be included in the long-term illness scheme through the medical card. I was contacted by a constituent in my home county, Mayo, whose husband has unfort…
I move: That Seanad Éireann: notes that: - there had been a downward trend in fatalities on Irish roads since the introduction of the first Road Safety Strategy in 1997; - 2021 saw the lowest numbers killed on our roads since records began in 1959; - three of …
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.