Mary Seery Kearney
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 | 380 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 136 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 43 | |
| … 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 | 4 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 4 | 0 |
Not scored: 93 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 support (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted NIL · with their party
I respectfully disagree with Senator Warfield regarding the rushed nature of this debate. Every week since we began Committee Stage, we have received emails asking when this Bill will be back on the agenda and reminding us of the urgency involved. The most important sections of the 2015 Act were, regrettably, never commenced. There is nothing rushed about the legislation. However, it does contain elements with which …
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
What can I say? Much has been said here today, as well as in the Dáil. I have read over the debate on this Bill in the Dáil and I have no doubt that during Committee and Report Stages in this House much will be said to create misinformation, spin and nice little sound bites to be posted on social media about the LDA, which will not do anything to advance real people getting into real houses. The Government is working…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support the Minister on this point. It is found in other legislation and in general legal terms " in loco parentis " means anyone who is in the position of the parent. It does not just apply to foster carers. It applies to anyone stepping into that position.…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I echo the sentiments and spirit of Senator McGreehan's proposal on the basis that I have had the experience myself, when dining in Kings Inns, of a senior member of the Law Library asking me what school I went to. When I replied, the next comment was, "How very remiss of your parents." I support her views. I have three points to raise with regard to the changing environment and our requirement for compliance. At the…
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 | 722 | +0.430 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 8 | -0.330 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 26 | -0.024 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 27 | +0.078 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 21 | +0.255 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 90 | +0.375 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 26 | +0.471 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 234 | +0.480 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 102 | +0.486 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 21 | +0.516 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 24 | +0.537 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 17 | +0.579 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 5 | +0.613 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 33 | +0.632 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 29 | +0.677 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 20 | +0.771 |
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 commend the Bill. I welcome the people in the Visitors Gallery and I thank them for all the hard work they have done on this issue. This amendment is fanciful and deliberately tabled to allow access to people within a building and within the proximity of a c…
I wish to be associated with the remarks on John Connor. My sympathies go to his family on the shock and suddenness of his loss which no doubt will be a terrible tragedy to his family and friends and all those who knew him. Over recent days that most elusive o…
Senator Keogan's sharing of her story sums up and brings into this Chamber just how invasive and frightening it can be, so I thank her for that. I commend my Fianna Fáil colleagues on bringing forward this important legislation. I commend the bravery of Una Ri…
I will raise two matters. One is very close to the Deputy Leader's heart and relates to the motion she tabled. It concerns the publication of the St. John Ambulance report regarding sexual abuse in that organisation. I pay tribute to Mr. Mick Finnegan who toda…
I thank the Minister for his statement and for the strength of his position over the weekend. As a Government colleague and a party colleague I wish to express my pride in how he has represented our country and spoken on its behalf on the international stage. …
To say I am not impressed by that response is mild, to be perfectly honest, and with due respect to the Minister of State, who is merely the messenger. That the Departments have a view to developing a policy paper is a wholly inadequate and absolutely unaccept…
I disagree with the amendments for the following reasons. In the apology the Minister gave to those affected, in this House, I did speak about the fact that illegality has an implication of criminality and that there needs to be a mechanism for assessment of t…
I thank the Minister very much for taking my Commencement matter today. Medical and psychological professionals throughout the world have stated that LGBTI people who experience conversion therapy are almost twice as likely to think about or attempt suicide th…
We have all had emails this morning about protests this afternoon and there is an unprecedented number of emails regarding Gaza. There is no question that the savagery on all sides there has been horrific since 7 October. I want to raise the point that, throug…
I completely support the motion. In a way I regret that it is needed. It has certainly been a very long two years and quite horrific. There are invitations in and I have already committed to events on the weekend of 24 February. As of today, how many thousands…
I am very grateful to the Cathaoirleach for selecting this Commencement matter. As a member of a Government party, I should be able to be out in the constituency of Dublin South-Central lauding the fact the Government has moved on an apartment and duplex remed…
I propose an amendment to the Order of Business, that No. 18 be taken before No. 1. This will be seconded by Senator Dolan. The Non-Fatal Offences against the Person (Amendment) (Spiking) Bill 2023 is being brought forward by the Fine Gael Group. Its purpose i…
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.