Michael Healy-Rae
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 | 836 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 127 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 71 | |
| … 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 | 5 | 1 |
| Contradicted their words | 3 | 1 |
Not scored: 56 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 oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I have no confidence in this Government. It has made a mess of the hospital service. University Hospital Kerry may as well close its doors tonight because of mismanagement at government level. Poor decision after poor decision has been made by a Government completely out of touch. Katherine Zappone was not going to represent me or the people of Kerry whom I represent. That is why what the Government did was so wrong.…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I am disappointed with the Minister of State's performance here this evening. The one thing that I will say to both the Minister and the Minister of State is that they should remember 30 September because the people of Ireland are watching and they listened carefully to what the Minister of State said earlier on. There are many millers watching this tonight and many contractors who are desperately hoping that they wi…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
Last night I was not convinced by the Minister of State's argument and I am still not convinced today, and I am sorry to say that. The Bill contains a number of provisions that will affect highly effective charity fundraising for deserving causes around Ireland, via radio bingo games on local radio. These games, which raise significant and much needed funds for charities, involve the distribution of bingo books in lo…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · against their party
I have grave concerns with this local property tax, and I have studied it greatly. My colleagues in the Rural Independent Group share these concerns. Many people living in rural areas may have as part of their dwelling an outhouse, such as a garage or a shed, that they may have built when they were starting out and then improved over the years. Now, those people are faced with the prospect of an improved shed, which …
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 | 940 | +0.345 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 36 | +0.113 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 56 | +0.134 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 46 | +0.302 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 20 | +0.329 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 13 | +0.400 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 385 | +0.413 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 5 | +0.416 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 19 | +0.429 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 64 | +0.434 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 13 | +0.445 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 21 | +0.463 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 19 | +0.483 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 35 | +0.552 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 21 | +0.579 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 21 | +0.585 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 16 | +0.661 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 31 | +0.671 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 28 | +0.871 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 5 | +0.904 |
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.
If he did, he would not have said what he said. A lot has been said about the 73% of people who say that they do not want this type of fox hunting to continue. There is an important statistic left out of that, which is that 98% of those people said they had ne…
I thank Deputy Cullinane and his party for bringing this very important motion before the House this evening. I also welcome the people from the sector in the Public Gallery. If I am ever wrong about anything I will always admit it. I thought all along that th…
In the absence of Deputy Mattie McGrath and on behalf of the Rural Independent Group, I offer our sincerest sympathies to Sir David Amess's family, his constituents and the whole political system, which has been rocked by this shocking attack on democracy beca…
I have been providing accommodation for the past 35 years and I am glad to have been involved in it. I voted against ending the eviction ban. I believe the statistics in County Kerry prove I did the right thing in not agreeing with the Government. The people w…
It is a bad reflection on the Taoiseach. It is a very bad reflection on his character that he would not take back an untruth about another person. That is very wrong and very unfair. The only person who will look bad out of this is the Taoiseach because what h…
Ahead of next week's important summit, it is of grave importance that we deal with the hike in energy prices, migration and, of course, external relations. There is currently no co-ordinated EU policy on strategic gas reserves, with each member state having it…
The then Government had to realise that it had to give licences to people and it did. I know that a number of weeks ago the Taoiseach answered me in the House and said that the Government was not looking at an amnesty. If the Government is not going to look at…
What I am going to ask the Taoiseach for is very sensible and sound and I am sure everyone in this House will agree with it. When a person receives a diagnosis of cancer, I humbly ask him, the Minister for Health and the Department of Health that for a three-m…
I thank Sinn Féin most sincerely. It is ironic. I will say this directly to the Sinn Féin Members. Last night, I was at a meeting with a young adult who had been adversely affected by what happened to her because of the situation in south Kerry. I told her tha…
The main thing to say is that we must make every effort we can make to protect the lives of people who are vulnerable or endangered by this inhuman practice. We must put our shoulders to the wheel and try to stop, prohibit and hinder this awful practice in eve…
More than 12,000 people are homeless. The housing policy has been failing for more than 14 years. The health system is in turmoil. Nearly 1 million people are on a waiting list for hospital procedures. There are nonsensical green agendas to the detriment of ru…
Some 900,000 people are waiting for operations, including 100,000 children and cancer patients. I have no confidence in the Government because of that. Patients are having to go to Belfast every month to save their eyesight. I have no confidence in the Governm…
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.