Neasa Hourigan
Not yet computed for this member.
The alignment pipeline has not produced a score here. That is usually because this member never spoke in a debate section that went to a division with an attributable question — see the coverage table below.
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 | 127 | +0.468 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 5 | +0.073 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 7 | +0.277 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 5 | +0.312 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 5 | +0.362 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 5 | +0.494 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 10 | +0.535 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 6 | +0.622 |
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.
As an inner city representative, I would like to touch on a related but very important topic, which is the privatisation of waste collection services. It simply has not worked and I would like to see the re-municipalisation of waste collection services. In my …
I will reiterate that we are 12 days away and none of us has seen those regulations. That is why there is an urgency about a delay. I have some more questions. The Minister of State mentioned issues such as exemption certificates. We do not know yet why, unlik…
Along with the Syrian refugee and human rights activist, Ms Sarah Mardini, Mr. Seán Binder was arrested in 2018 and accused by Greek authorities of espionage, aiding human trafficking and belonging to a criminal organisation. Mr. Binder, whose mother lives in …
I thank the Minister of State. As he said, build-to-rent makes up 16% overall but that figure is 65% in my constituency. That is a predominance of build-to-rent. I take the Minister of State's point about Maynooth but we might just stick with the issue around …
I am very heartened to hear of the threading through of issues of child poverty throughout the Minister's statement. I appreciate that housing is not his brief, but we have 2,500 children in emergency accommodation. The cost of rents in particular is rising ra…
If I could just expand a little, we know the prevalence of ASD might be four times higher in the prison population. We are also aware that we require extra capacity in the prison population in Ireland and there are a number of overcrowding issues. People with …
Approximately one in 20 people in Ireland lives with diabetes. Despite this, we do not have a good handle on clinical outcomes or prevalence rates at a geographical level. This means we cannot provide the appropriate services where they are needed. University …
This is less of a speech than a plea and some questions and the plea would be that the Government delays the XL bully dogs ban because to implement it in the outlined timeline would be very dangerous. We are 12 days from the beginning of the XL bully dogs ban …
The Guardian newspaper, based on an investigation by Greenpeace UK, reported last week that leading European agribusiness groups using a manifesto called the Dublin Declaration have been lobbying senior EU officials against recommendations for reduced meat con…
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.