Michael McDowell
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 | 239 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 171 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 72 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 26 |
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 | 19 | 2 |
| Contradicted their words | 4 | 0 |
Not scored: 99 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 welcome the Minister and thank him for his attendance. There are many features of this Bill with which I am in complete agreement and there are others on which I am mainly in agreement, subject to some criticisms I might have to make. One of the principal functions of this legislation, as introduced by the then Minister, Deputy McEntee, was the abolition of juries in the High Court. That is a matter that is strongl…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
That left the law in that condition. There were people who said this was a correct decision of Mr. Justice Ó Caoimh, and others who said it should be done by the Legislature and not by a High Court judge. There were suggestions that we were not to slavishly follow decisions of the House of Lords in England, whether we agreed with them or not, where they changed the substantive law of defamation to provide a new form …
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
First, I note this legislation started in Dáil Éireann and is coming to this House where it will effectively be amended and it will then, apparently, be approved by Dáil Éireann. There are a few points that I would like to raise, although maybe it is a bit late to do so as it has arrived at this stage in this House. What we are doing here is conferring on the Central Bank massive powers in regard to individual person…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.66) · voted TA · with their party
I strongly urge the Minister to reconsider this particular amendment. This amendment to the Act of 2009 was tendered in the course of the Dáil debate by the Minister. It is not referred to, as far as I can see, in the original explanatory memorandum and it actually promises a very radical effect of change in the defamation law of this country. The House should be made aware that back in 2006 and 2007, when the 2009 l…
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 | 904 | +0.259 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 5 | -0.235 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 18 | -0.174 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 77 | -0.137 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 32 | -0.051 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 17 | +0.212 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 8 | +0.252 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 321 | +0.276 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 7 | +0.279 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 16 | +0.307 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 320 | +0.340 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 6 | +0.377 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 33 | +0.421 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 40 | +0.566 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 6 | +0.595 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 9 | +0.619 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 19 | +0.661 |
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.
-----to ensure that it was not done. There is a right of appeal to the Circuit Court but there are people who fall through those cracks and end up in Mountjoy Prison. Their lives are ruined forever. The time has come for the Department of Justice to face up to…
I sympathise completely with the remarks made by other Senators regarding what we are being told in the media about what the Government intends to do on the basis of the advice from NPHET. I have no confidence in NPHET for the very simple reason that the diffe…
I advert to an issue arising out of the recent troubles in Dublin. People have been speaking about an expectation that the Judiciary will inflict tough sentences. The Judiciary will do what it will do. I draw attention to one simple fact, which is that, at the…
First of all, I welcome the Minister of State to the House. This Bill is a catch-all measure. I have no objection to that. There are little things that have to be done right across the Department of Justice's portfolio of responsibilities and instead of having…
No, it is not agreed. I just want to simply say that I will not put it to a vote, but I am not agreeing it for the reasons that I mentioned earlier. I just wanted to put reform on the agenda. Arising out of what the Leader just said, I also want to say that tr…
In relation to what is happening in Gaza I want to make some remarks. What happened last Saturday must be classified as utterly unforgivable, utterly wrong and completely inexcusable. To invade across an internationally recognised boundary, round up people and…
It is on the Order of Business that we should have no debate on Ukraine and pass a resolution in line with that in Dáil Éireann. I have no argument with the terms of the notice of motion that is there. However, I want to say this. They are very mild in their t…
I welcome the Minister. There are a few things I want to say. It seems there is now a decent Garda presence in Dublin city. I said at a meeting of the justice committee that my business means that I traverse the city up to four times a day, moving from here to…
The definition of the emergency period is one of a period where the 5 km restriction is in place. That is, unfortunately, what we are doing. It probably makes no difference, because at the snail's pace at which things are happening it probably will stay in pla…
I ask Senators to recall that section 40(a), of the legislation that was passed in 2007, states: The purpose of subsections (10) and (11) is to provide that in view of the harm caused to society by the unlawful possession and use of firearms, a court, in impos…
I was badly interrupted, so the Chair might give me another 20 seconds. It is important that we do not spend our time making futile statements to each other and that we deal with legislation, which is badly needed. Where is the Land Development Agency Bill? Wh…
I have one point to make regarding the conversations that have been happening in the wings of this House and in respect of the business before us. The previous Seanad passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018, which was measured …
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.