Michael Ring
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 | 649 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 17 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 7 | |
| … 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 | 1 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 10 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 6 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 | 118 | +0.351 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 5 | +0.138 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 8 | +0.203 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 7 | +0.279 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 37 | +0.348 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 9 | +0.445 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 5 | +0.486 |
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.
It saddens me tonight to have to raise this matter in the Topical Issue debate. It is outrageous that a major company such as Roadbridge would leave so many people without work. I want to speak about the subcontractors. In Mayo alone, anything up to €13 millio…
We will need to get written responses to the issues Deputy Conway-Walsh and others raised because I do not have the time. I want to be associated with her words of sympathy to Alan Duffy and his family. Regarding what happened in America, the Deputy asked me w…
I will put two brief questions to the Minister. First, will he take staff from other Departments and put them into the Passport Office to try to deal with the emergency? Second, and seriously, is it not time that the Department considered putting a passport of…
I thank the Ceann Comhairle. I welcome the Bill on the directly elected mayor for Limerick, but I have to say that with a big caution. Really in this country we have the Civil Service and the county managers running the country. I am sick and tired of it. The …
I should not have to come to the House today to raise this issue. It has been going on for 15 years. Irish Water, and Mayo County Council before it, have not deal with this issue. There are 115 houses affected. It is a terrible thing when people pay their taxe…
I thank the Minister for his answer. I acknowledge that the staff of the Passport Office are working under difficult conditions, but this is an essential service. I warned the Department three months ago that this problem would arise and it has now happened. T…
I am not happy with that reply. When I raised this in the Dáil last year the Department had to write to me afterwards because I made allegations that there were vehicles in Donegal that were not insured. The record of the Dáil should be corrected because the D…
With regard to the Passport Office, I agree with all the previous speakers. Who made the decision at the beginning of the pandemic that this was not an essential service? Was it a Secretary General who the Minister has now made an ambassador and who got reward…
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.