Nessa Cosgrove
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 | 173 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 87 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 34 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 6 |
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 | 4 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 53 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 oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I thank Senator Stephenson for raising this and I am proud to be a member of our Cross-Party Group. We are using our Private Members' time for this vital Bill. I also give credit to the Civil Engagement Group and Senators Higgins and Black, who have done a lot of work in this area and have brought forward similar legislation. The Bill will introduce a random inspection and enforceme…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.45) · voted NIL · with their party
I do not oppose any investment in the ESB infrastructure - it is very welcome - but what I am concerned about, and what I do oppose, is where this investment will go and what the money is to be spent on. I will speak in support of the amendments tabled by both Senators Collins and Higgins. All their amendments are really well thought out. They make a lot of sense and they have put a lot of work into them. I really ho…
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 | 282 | +0.322 | +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 | 12 | -0.276 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 14 | -0.181 |
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 5 | -0.146 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 5 | -0.084 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 10 | -0.020 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 9 | +0.197 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 15 | +0.298 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 25 | +0.313 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 29 | +0.380 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 38 | +0.493 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 26 | +0.493 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 16 | +0.542 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 11 | +0.583 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 16 | +0.676 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 8 | +0.676 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 13 | +0.761 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 7 | +0.775 |
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 move amendment No. 48: In page 27, line 7, to delete ", or that of another person,". Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. These amendments, which Senator Harmon and I have tabled, seek to delete the reference to threats to the life or health of another person …
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I welcome this debate. It has been said many times before that the Inspector of Prisons Mark Kelly has described the conditions in our prisons as "inhumane and degrading", which has led to the increase in deaths in custody. I did m…
I am disappointed, because the Minister of State's response is a bit out of kilter with the findings of the Department's expert review panel. There is no doubt that there is a big difference between mental health and psychosocial disability but the Minister of…
We do not really have a response yet and do not have a timeline. The danger is that, because of the presidential election and then we are going to be coming up to Christmas, this issue will be kicked down the road again. The Minister of State mentioned the fra…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I thank Senator Stephenson for raising this and I am proud to be a member of our Cross-Party Group. We are using our Private Members' time for this vital Bill. I also give credit to the Civil Engagement Group and Senators Hig…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I thank the Minister for coming in. The Taoiseach has been quoted as saying child poverty will be prioritised in the forthcoming budget. This is so welcome. We are all looking forward to hearing the budget. It has been widely repor…
I move amendment No. 7: “Notices of termination: temporary ban 3. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act or any other enactment or rule of law, the period of 3 years commencing on the passing of this Act is deemed to be an emergency period within the …
On the day that is in it, I wish I did not have to read this but it is the elephant in the room that is preventing us here in the Seanad from fully doing the job we are elected and paid to do. The notion that TDs who negotiated the programme for Government are…
The Minister is very welcome. It is great to see a woman in the role and I have no doubt she will excel at it. I will speak about poverty and women’s health. Poverty affects the health of men and women but there is the feminisation of poverty, by which I mean …
I, too, commend my colleague Senator Stephenson on bringing this forward. I wish to speak about healthcare workers and read out the names of just five nurses who have been killed: Omar Khorsheed, Mohammed Lubbad, Mohammed Al Azzaiza, Ahmed Moshtaha and Somaya …
A motion moved yesterday in the Dáil by the Labour Party called on the Government to take immediate action to address child poverty and child homelessness. The latest ESRI report states child poverty has reached unthinkable levels in Ireland. One in five child…
I thank the Minister of State for displaying a real interest in this. The non-demolition option is not working because, as I said earlier, if there is a defective block the deterioration can go into healthy blocks without people knowing. As such, demolition is…
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.