Micheál Carrigy
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 | 801 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 106 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 38 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 14 |
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 | 7 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 7 | 0 |
Not scored: 68 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 (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I thank the Minister for accepting the proposals we put forward on the sporting organisations. It stemmed from a thought-provoking congress when Larry McCarthy, the president of the GAA, put it forward that sporting organisations needed to get on board in this regard. I believe that in the past month, the GAA has engaged with Google. The Minister of State, Deputy Chambers, was recently in Croke Park to work on this i…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted NIL · with their party
I support Senator Dooley. I am a member of the IPU and would have raised that issue in this House. I fully support him in calling for the Minister to come before us. It is important that we support the network. I also wish to raise the issue of the certainty of funding for development officers in various sports partnerships throughout the country. The challenge for sports partnerships is that they only have certainty…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
The reality is that the Government will never be in a position to compensate people for the cost-of-living increases. In fact, Ireland and the rest of the world are facing a cost-of-living crisis. It is driven by inflation, which is largely caused by factors beyond our control. Sinn Féin is criticising and asking what Fine Gael has done. It is demanding social welfare increases. The Minister for Social Protection, De…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
With regard to section 139D and the issue of age-appropriate online content, the Bill refers to content that is unsuitable for children, either generally or below a particular age, having regard to their capabilities, but it does not actually state an age. What is an appropriate age? There was a recommendation from the Oireachtas joint committee to have a minimum age for social media accounts and put the responsibili…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support the comments of my colleagues. It is extremely important that we have an online safety commissioner. That was one of the main recommendations that came from the Oireachtas joint committee which looked at the Australian model which is very successful and working well. We need to follow best practice. I agree with the comment from Senator Higgins that we need people to buy into this legislation. If we proceed…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I thank the Cathaoirleach and the Acting Leader. I would like to raise an issue that has been debated in both Houses in previous times. I refer to the 1,700 independent, not-for-profit, section 39 organisations. In particular, I am speaking of St. Christopher's Services in Longford. These organisations provide vital services for thousands of people throughout Ireland with various disabilities. These services are not …
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.80) · voted NIL · with their party
I support the proposal. The proposed section 19A(2) states: The Panel shall advise the Commission on issues of interest to children and young people, on online safety, and on any other matters as the Commission may determine. That is the priority of this legislation. It is about safeguarding our youth. The best people to tell us where the problems lie are our young people. They are very forceful in doing that. Along …
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 | 566 | +0.664 | +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 | 7 | +0.292 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 6 | +0.400 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 27 | +0.553 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 18 | +0.582 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 11 | +0.582 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 20 | +0.609 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 19 | +0.630 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 30 | +0.636 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 53 | +0.645 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 48 | +0.646 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 35 | +0.679 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 107 | +0.693 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 22 | +0.739 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 73 | +0.758 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 44 | +0.805 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 13 | +0.870 |
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.
I raise the disparity in overnight rates between the public service and the Civil Service. It has been highlighted to me, with regard to Garda overnight rates, that if a Garda has to come from somewhere such as Belmullet in County Mayo to the Central Criminal …
Like my colleagues, I too have a query on why the entire section dealing with harassment has been removed from the Bill. The Title of the Bill includes the word "harassment". I speak as one whose family suffered harassment and had to go the Garda. Luckily, the…
I concur with Senator Fitzpatrick's comments. We need to value our nurses, and I believe we do. It is important that the Minister for Health should come before the House to deal with that. The demand for a €100 registration fee, which was sent out to nurses in…
I raise an issue that has been raised by a number of other Senators, namely, the issue of fathers being at natal appointments and the birth of their children. In early December, it was announced that women attending their 20-week scan will now be able to be ac…
I raise the national broadband plan and suggest we have a discussion with the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, about the advice given as to where builds take place. I will speak in particular about one area in south Longford, the town of Ballymahon, and the genera…
I wish to raise the issue of insurance. All Senators are well aware of the big problem it is for many people and businesses across the country. I welcome the new action plan for insurance reform published by the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and …
The reality is that tourist numbers are down regionally across the country and tourism spend is down in public houses, restaurants and so on due to the lack of rooms, yet some of the hotels do this. It is in Dublin - I will call it out. This could destroy the …
I agree with Senator McGreehan that it is not living with Covid-19 but coping with Covid-19. It is important to remember those who have died due to Covid-19, and their families, and express our sympathies. The restrictions have prevented people from comforting…
The one line that stands out to me again is that the "interim arrangements will continue until at least 2 July". The interim arrangements to get a contract were meant to be until the end of January; then the end of April and now they are until 2 July. I acknow…
I feel I must come in here and support the comments of my colleague, Senator Dolan. Senator Boyhan made outrageous remarks to accuse the Minister of State of being influenced in putting forward this legislation today. He should withdraw his remarks because tha…
I thank the Minister of State. She said that it is a critical strategic corridor for the north west and critical to our national development plan. However, the reply states that funding is in place to complete the route option selection process by quarter 2. T…
I wish to raise ophthalmology services in Longford-Westmeath or the lack thereof. In 2024 we lost our service in Longford and since then we have had periods of no service with people having to travel to Dublin or Athlone or a temporary service back in Longford…
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.