Mike Kennelly
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 | 182 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 6 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 3 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 1 |
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: 3 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 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 | 147 | +0.491 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 6 | +0.039 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 5 | +0.201 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 5 | +0.283 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 14 | +0.320 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 39 | +0.347 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 6 | +0.491 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 13 | +0.512 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 5 | +0.634 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 13 | +0.668 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 7 | +0.702 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 8 | +0.799 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 14 | +0.843 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 5 | +0.960 |
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 would like to speak on an issue that may sound dramatic but is an issue of life and death at the moment, that is, the urgent need to introduce mandatory cardiac screening for all competitive sports players between the ages of 12 and 18. Too often we only act…
I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House today on a really serious topic. I am not going rehash everything that has been said. However, the situation in Kerry is particularly concerning. According to the latest figures, the waiting time for a driv…
I am pleased to support the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) (Amendment) (Work Equipment) Bill 2026. One thing I will say tonight is that it is significant legislation. By no means, from this debate tonight, do we want to dilute it. This legislation…
I welcome the Minister of State back to the floor of the Seanad. It is unfortunate that I have to raise this Commencement matter again. I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Moran, for coming to receive it. I need to raise this issue of critical and urgent imp…
I thank the Minister of State for the reply. It is very unfortunate that this is my third time to get the same response on the floor of the Seanad, and I am probably getting the same response from Kerry County Council. The Minister of State said we will all wo…
I rise today to express serious concern regarding the effectiveness of the 2025 Department of justice public awareness campaign on the dangers of illegal fireworks, which was launched in September by the Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan. While the campaign rightly…
I thank the Minister of State for taking the Commencement matter on behalf of the Minister for Transport. The reply refers to "TIl, in conjunction with the local authorities concerned" and states, "TII ultimately delivers the national roads programme" - absolu…
The scheme was introduced for people facing homelessness so tenants could be put in a place where properties could be purchased without leaving the properties and facing homelessness. Properties cannot be got when a notice to quit has been served on a family. …
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.