Michael Moynihan
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 | 1,043 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 2 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 2 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
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 | 0 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 0 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
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 | 603 | +0.790 | +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 | 5 | +0.570 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 26 | +0.621 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 5 | +0.697 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 9 | +0.785 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 70 | +0.788 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 7 | +0.826 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 9 | +0.830 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 19 | +0.834 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 8 | +0.852 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 88 | +0.887 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 129 | +0.891 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 5 | +0.899 |
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.
The building is owned by the Courts Service. It was signed into ownership by the State in 2004, almost 180 years after it was built. The point I am making is, there is a trajectory of funding that has to be done but there is an immediacy about what we are tryi…
The specific line in the reply is "there is no intention to purchase military equipment from Israel". This is an issue the Senator has been passionate about, not just for the past 18 or 20 months, but for a long time. Like him, we are horrified by what has hap…
The bridewell is adjacent to the courthouse. I commend the Courts Service, in particular Ms Ruth Penney, who was more than helpful in trying to preserve the bridewell last year. The building was porous with water flowing down it and some remedial work was done…
In regard to the medical card, there is one other issue on disabilities. I do not wish to list the disabilities, but I refer to a person with a diagnosis of a lifelong disability and who got a medical card in his or her younger years. At some point, there is a…
I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. I will speak on the various aspects of the Bill. It is important that the Bill is passed to ensure that the provisions within it are brought into law in order that survivors of institutional abuse are looked afte…
I thank the Ceann Comhairle. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this matter. The issues here have manifested themselves over the past number of months, in particular, in respect of the waiting times for ambulances. In the area I come from in Duhallow, ambul…
What plans are there for the courthouse on Church Street in Kanturk, which has stood idle for many years? The courthouse and the bridewell jail beside it have historical significance, with the jail containing a great deal of graffiti from the War of Independen…
I welcome the opportunity to speak on Deputy Cairns' motion. I also welcome the motion. I want to raise three issues. Week after week, the witnesses who come before the Joint Committee on Disability Matters talk about the medical card and the possibilities for…
Over the last decade, the ambulance service was removed and after much lobbying and negotiations, we got the ambulance back. I am talking about the time that a general practitioner, GP, arrives at a patient's door, assesses the patient and says that an ambulan…
Regarding the building's ownership, will the Minister of State commit to getting the documentation from the Courts Service? It could then be forwarded to the committee that has been formed to restore the courthouse. It is important that we have the deeds or re…
There have been many discussions in the House about the cost of fuel and the way it is impacting on society and on the challenges many families are facing. I would point to two statistics. In 2008, the price of oil was €187 a barrel and the price at the pumps …
I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill and I also welcome the Bill. The bureaucratic system surrounding planning is fundamental in blocking or stopping development. That bureaucratic system has been allowed to develop because local authorities, An Bord…
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.