Niall Blaney
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 | 434 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 20 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 7 | |
| … 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 | 2 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 13 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 | 126 | +0.613 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 11 | +0.595 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 58 | +0.614 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 5 | +0.628 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 7 | +0.668 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 9 | +0.731 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 20 | +0.835 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 6 | +0.954 |
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 concur with the sentiments expressed by Senator Ó Donnghaile regarding the protocol. I rise today to deal with the tragedy, of which we are all aware, that took place in Creeslough in Donegal last October where many lives were lost. I have been contacted by …
I ask the Leader for a debate on the independence of our media. I am talking about all media across the whole island of Ireland, not just in the Republic. The lack of reporting with regard to what is happening in Derry is extraordinary. I refer to the situatio…
I fully support my Donegal colleague, Senator Flynn. The way she was treated last night was atrocious. I congratulate her for using her power this morning to highlight it. She is absolutely an equal Member of this House. I want to talk about the A5 route. With…
I rise today to raise the decision in recent days on the A5. For us in the north west, it is not just the A5 but is also the N2. The decision by a judge in the Belfast courts has hit the headlines in recent days. It is shocking news for many of us. The first t…
I move: “That Seanad Éireann: recognising that: - there were nineteen people who ‘disappeared’ as a result of paramilitary organisations during the Troubles/Conflict; - of these nineteen, to date fourteen of the victims have been recovered, with five still mis…
There was reference to a figure of 40% and an all-encompassing remark was made that was on the basis of greed. That is wrong and I would like it withdrawn.…
The Minister of State is very welcome. I commend the ongoing efforts at the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, with the senior Minister and the Ministers of State. I find it laughable to hear some of the comments from the Opposition, particu…
I thank the Minister of State for making herself available at such short notice. It was just last Friday morning that I rose here to ask for such a debate. I am glad it is happening so soon. It is only right as it is a relevant topic that should have the atten…
I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I raise this matter and call on the Government and European Union to act swiftly to deal with the dumping of electricity generated by renewable sources, particularly in rural areas. I can speak only in real terms o…
I raise an undesired situation in Donegal. The chief executive of Donegal County Council yesterday had to write to some of the protesters who attended the chambers in Lifford last week in respect of the mica scheme to raise the intimidation of his staff by cer…
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.