Mary Fitzpatrick
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 | 503 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 111 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 39 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 10 |
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 | 7 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 72 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 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
This issue is close to my heart as a former local authority member. I am proud to have been elected and re-elected to the largest local authority in the country, Dublin City Council. I also speak on behalf of the Fianna Fáil Seanad group. All Fianna Fáil Senators are close to the local authority members and many of them had the honour of being elected to their local authority and representing their local communities.…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I thank the Minister of State for accepting the amendment and moving his own amendments. It is very important that we as a House copper-fasten the superior authority of the elected members of each local authority. I am very conscious that local authority members, especially here in Dublin, are undertaking marathon meetings, most of which have been virtual due to Covid, and it is most important that we support them to…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
This morning, I renew my request for this House to debate the issue of homelessness, particularly homelessness in Dublin city. This week, the deputy chief executive of Dublin City Council, Brendan Kenny, issued the latest report from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, which documented that, as of the last count, there are currently more than 6,227 homeless people in Dublin. There are more than 856 families with mo…
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 | 525 | +0.636 | +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 | 29 | -0.087 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 27 | +0.138 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 14 | +0.345 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 21 | +0.524 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 90 | +0.640 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 13 | +0.704 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 6 | +0.707 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 134 | +0.745 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 12 | +0.754 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 93 | +0.755 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 12 | +0.791 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 8 | +0.793 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 54 | +0.875 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 23 | +0.934 |
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 express my sincere commiseration to the family, friends and pupils of Ashling Murphy. Words can never adequately express our sympathy, sadness or anger. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam dílis. While the whole country is convulsed and repulsed by Ashling's murder…
I second the proposal of my colleague, Senator O'Loughlin, that leave be granted to introduce the Sex Offenders (Amendment) (Coercive Control) Bill 2023. The Bill originated as a suggestion from Jason Poole. Jason and his family tragically lost their beloved s…
I propose an amendment to the Order of Business, that No. 9 be taken before No.1. The Protection of Retail Workers Bill 2025 seeks to provide protection to people working on the front line of retail. There are more than 300,000 people working in retail through…
As the Deputy Leader is aware, the Oireachtas drugs committee is working to complete its report before the summer recess. As she is also aware, the Minister is producing a new drugs strategy. This week, the Health Research Board, HRB, released its latest repor…
Like others, I want to express my sympathies and condolences to the family of Tras Honan. May she rest in peace. Today I want to speak to the appalling events that took place in my constituency and my community last Thursday. I want to start by talking and thi…
Ovarian cancer is the sixth most commonly diagnosed female cancer in Ireland. More than 440 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer in Ireland every year and, sadly, more than 27 of them die. Ireland ranks among the highest countries for female mortality due t…
Senator Clonan is right. Society is measured by how it treats and values its most vulnerable. That is something none of us should ever forget. I am calling for a debate with the Minister for Justice on the motion passed unanimously in this House last week call…
All of our energies should be going on addressing what caused it and ensuring it never happens again. We need to have an uncompromising response to crime and antisocial behaviour in our communities. It was my community last week but it will be other Senators' …
I urge the Leader to contact the Minister for Finance before he publishes the finance Bill and ask him to extend, in budget 2022, the provision that exists for commercial residential landlords to claim tax relief to address fire defects in apartments to owner-…
Today, 25 November, is the UN's international day for the elimination of violence against women. The UN says violence against women and girls is one of the most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations in our world today. It remains large…
This week marked the start of 16 days of activism on the issue of violence against women. Women's Aid is leading a 16-day campaign against gender-based violence. Thirty-five percent of women in Ireland have experienced psychological, physical or sexual abuse f…
I welcome the Minister of State and thank him for coming to the House. The sharing of intimate images without consent is a serious issue, which warrants legislation and severe penalties. We need to call it out as a criminal offence and we need to hold those wh…
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.