Neale Richmond
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 | 1,014 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 11 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 11 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 2 |
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 | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 0 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 move amendment No. 30: In page 37, between lines 16 and 17, to insert the following: “Change of employer: application and approval of change 25. (1) This section applies where— (a) a general employment permit or a critical skills employment permit has been granted to a foreign national, (b) a prescribed period has elapsed since the foreign national first commenced employment in the State pursuant to an employment p…
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 | 931 | +0.661 | +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 | 24 | +0.142 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 6 | +0.154 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 12 | +0.354 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 28 | +0.389 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 8 | +0.422 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 5 | +0.627 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 6 | +0.688 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 21 | +0.693 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 128 | +0.751 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 6 | +0.763 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 34 | +0.763 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 19 | +0.771 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 58 | +0.778 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 67 | +0.819 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 20 | +0.824 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 74 | +0.825 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 122 | +0.840 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 7 | +0.843 |
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 history of war in Sudan is awful and bloody. It is also complex with regard to the parties to the war. We can talk about the RSF and the Government but we can also talk about various tribal militias who are agnostic with regard to who they side with in pur…
In the last couple of hours, we have seen that the Russian Federation has taken the decision to sanction the Taoiseach, the Ceann Comhairle and a number of Cabinet Ministers and Members of this House and the Seanad in a disgraceful statement that ends with a l…
I thank the Ceann Comhairle for taking this Topical Issue matter and holding it over from before the summer recess. I sincerely congratulate the Minister of State, Deputy James Browne, on his deserved appointment. I wish him well and hope he has a fruitful tim…
I am very grateful to the Deputy for raising this. I acknowledge the consistent effort by both Deputies Ó Laoghaire and Smith to raise this in a constructive manner. The conflict in Sudan, which has continued for over three years, is causing devastating levels…
Before I begin, I am very lucky to have known the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, for quite some time. We were on the county council together and it is very reassuring to see his professional background being used, so I take the opportunity to pay him credit,…
I join with others in paying absolute credit to the work of An Garda Síochána, not just in recent months but over a long time, across all our communities. It is the absolute backbone of our community. The work it does every day to keep us safe is what we rely …
Will the Tánaiste confirm that the Government will not only seek wide ranging sanctions on Russian officials and entities but also officials and entities in Belarus, occupied South Ossetia and occupied eastern Ukraine which have aided and abetted this invasion…
Let there be no underestimation. This is the worst humanitarian crisis happening in the world at the moment and it has been for a considerable time. It is the largest displacement of people, and Ireland will not be found wanting. As I mentioned, so far this ye…
Yesterday, patients of the GP practice in my village of Stepaside became the latest to be subjected to an act of sheer obstruction and intimidation by so-called protesters, simply because that medical practice offers full maternal and reproductive care, as per…
I am grateful for that comprehensive update from the Taoiseach. I join with others in strongly supporting his call for the full and rapid accession of Ukraine to the EU, as well as Moldova and Georgia in due course. One of the sad things, and we are over 100 d…
In the past week, the New IRA has been linked to two attacks on the police in Northern Ireland, the first such attacks since April. What is the Government doing, in partnership with the authorities in the United Kingdom and in Northern Ireland, despite the imp…
I will briefly mention two things in a potentially less negative response than usual but couched in the fact that, ultimately, we will not be accepting this recommendation. Obviously, those of us with young children know that Isofix is often an influence in ge…
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.