Mark Wall
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 | 739 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 103 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 40 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 8 |
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 | 6 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 63 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 support (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted NIL · with their party
I support Senator Clonan's and Senator Martin's contributions. I received a number of phone calls yesterday from very worried families of our brave Defence Forces members. We have to ask Senator Clonan to assure them that they are in our thoughts and prayers. We need to ensure that their safety is paramount at this time. Those brave people serving overseas are foremost in our thoughts today because their families are…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I want to be associated with the words of my colleague, Senator Black, regarding the Debenhams workers. Today is day 222. That is 222 days on strike. They are going to be outside the Dáil at 1 o'clock today and I support Senator Black's call for a debate in this House. I raise the urgent need for additional secondary school places in south Kildare and for a new secondary school based in the Curragh of Kildare to alle…
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 | 637 | +0.530 | +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 | 11 | +0.260 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 25 | +0.390 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 11 | +0.423 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 6 | +0.440 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 22 | +0.464 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 39 | +0.492 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 5 | +0.508 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 28 | +0.516 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 25 | +0.544 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 157 | +0.551 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 8 | +0.552 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 6 | +0.628 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 19 | +0.687 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 23 | +0.706 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 27 | +0.724 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 46 | +0.734 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 9 | +0.815 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 11 | +0.939 |
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 join in condemning the attack on the PSNI officer last night. It is horrific to even contemplate that his son witnessed the attack and that there were so many young people there. As has been said by my two colleagues, that message needs to go out loud and st…
I am clear in my support for increased public transport for Kildare South, but we know this extra capacity will take years. Commuters on the M7 and N7 cannot wait that long. Since I first raised this, I have been inundated with messages from commuters across L…
That is no problem at all. I second Senator Sherlock's amendment to the Order of Business if it is in order to do so. I will raise with the Leader an issue that has increasingly been raised with me in recent weeks. A lack of availability of prescription drugs …
I, too, welcome the Minister to the House. The lifting of the no-fault eviction ban is the most important issue I deal with at this time. I welcome the opportunity to discuss it with him this evening. As someone with community clinics, I can tell him that the …
The negative impact of Putin's illegal invasion is global and it will be with us for some time to come. As we mark this tragic anniversary, our thoughts must turn to the long-term need to rebuild Ukraine. We must redouble our efforts to create a world free fro…
I welcome the Minister of State back to the House. I thank Senator Martin for drafting this Bill down and asking me to cosign it. Unfortunately, technology, I believe, got in the way of that happening. However, I am happy to speak in support of the Bill. That …
I just want to take up that last point. I thank the Tánaiste again but that is the point we are all trying to make here. The Tánaiste mentioned that the 1954 Act includes the phrase "political matters". The phrase "Government policy matters" is a new one that …
I want to be associated with the vote of sympathy at the start of business today on behalf of the Labour Party. I want to raise two issues today. The first is to seek a further debate on housing. My colleague, Senator Moynihan, has continued to raise the housi…
Has the Government not been monitoring the WRC cases on their legislation? It is crazy that the Government would consider a right to request that is simply not working as fair. How out of touch can it be with the thousands of workers in this country who can wo…
It is good to see the Deputy Leader in the chair today. I will bring up a number of worrying cases I have been involved in or am currently dealing with that have regard to utility companies whose customers have contacted me. In one case, I spent a number of da…
I, too, welcome our guests from the Republic of Kenya. They are very welcome to the House. I also join with the Cathaoirleach in sending condolences to the D'Arcy family on the passing of Michael senior. I thank him for his service over many years. I also join…
I rise in the Chamber tonight to once again try to get to some solutions to the car park the N7-M7 has become. People are spending their lives in cars. They drive for three hours every morning to work and drive back home for three hours every evening. Some peo…
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.