Matt Carthy
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 | 1,012 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 124 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 59 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 12 |
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 | 10 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 65 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 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I am speaking in response to the Minister. He is the one who wanted to bring this to the floor of the Dáil. He is the one who refused the opportunity provided to him by the Oireachtas justice committee to have deliberations across every single amendment and section where these should be discussed - in the committee chamber. He was the one who wanted to allow it to take place on the floor of this Dáil, which means tha…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 4: In page 6, to delete lines 18 to 35, and in page 7, to delete lines 1 to 9. I will also speak to amendment No. 6. Amendment No. 4 is a simple but substantive amendment. We have spoken about this previously. Our principal objection to this legislation is the abolition of juries in all cases. I believe the Minister would privately accept that this is a bad, dangerous and nonsensical position to …
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 | 1,291 | +0.287 | +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 | 23 | -0.126 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 19 | -0.069 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 31 | -0.040 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 55 | +0.004 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 49 | +0.041 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 16 | +0.156 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 19 | +0.237 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 8 | +0.243 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 46 | +0.267 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 28 | +0.273 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 14 | +0.362 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 93 | +0.387 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 40 | +0.413 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 49 | +0.426 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 10 | +0.539 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 8 | +0.569 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 12 | +0.653 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 25 | +0.691 |
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.
Gabhaim buíochas leis an Teachta Coppinger as díospóireacht a thabhairt chun cinn ar an gceist thábhachtach seo mar caithfimid deireadh a chur le foréigean in aghaidh mná agus cailíní. I thank the movers of this motion, particularly Deputy Coppinger, who has a…
The Taoiseach said the homelessness issue goes to the heart of the type of society we want to be. What does it say about our society under his Government that homelessness figures are rising month on month and are now reaching what would be the horrendous scan…
What we have seen are snobbery and condescension, which are the hallmarks of a century-old cosy cartel that does not like to be challenged on its failures, especially by those it looks down on, that is, those who broke its golden circle which tolerated and, in…
The Minister knows what the outcome of the report will be, namely, that the deal will be a bad one for Ireland. He also knows what the deal's benefits are. They accrue to the German car manufacturing sector. That is why the Irish Government will not stand up a…
Every political issue is put into perspective by our previous conversation and contributions. Focus Ireland has published its annual report on homelessness and it makes for alarming reading. The report states that rising homelessness in Ireland is not inevitab…
The encouraging of the large Israeli military convoy into Ramallah led to at least 35 people being wounded, at least 20 of whom received their injuries from live bullets. Israeli forces were ostensibly seeking to demolish the home of a man accused of attacks i…
When we were here this day last week the Taoiseach commented that more than 5,000 people were reported to have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza. That figure now stands at well over 10,000. We should all stop and think about those numbers for a moment. Mo…
The world, and especially Irish people, are horrified by what they have seen over the past 120 days or so, particularly in Gaza, where Israeli forces have deliberately murdered civilians and targeted civilian infrastructure, including every hospital in Gaza. T…
We have had 13 years of Fine Gael in government. We have had 13 years of Deputies Harris, Varadkar and Donnelly as Ministers for Health who, in many instances, made our health services worse. The experience of health for many people under this Government means…
Decades of failures by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments to plan for the expansion of key water, wastewater and electricity infrastructure is part of the reason the same Governments have failed to get to grips with the housing crisis. I asked the then Mini…
I might not have been clear. I specifically asked about victims being informed that their attackers have deceased subsequent to release. In relation to section 8, the difficulty is that many of the testimonies we hear are inconsistent. Many victims have told m…
I have a substantive question but I am somewhat perplexed by the Minister's apparent lack of understanding of exactly what happened across families and communities from Sunday night until Monday night after the news broke at 9 p.m. that NPHET proposed to move …
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.