Niamh Smyth
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 | 939 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 6 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 6 | |
| … 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: 0 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 | 369 | +0.640 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 14 | -0.036 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 9 | +0.270 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 12 | +0.355 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 17 | +0.474 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 20 | +0.577 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 8 | +0.627 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 13 | +0.631 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 6 | +0.717 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 25 | +0.722 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 7 | +0.818 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 37 | +0.912 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 12 | +0.952 |
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 thank the Minister for his foresight in seeing where I was trying to get with the question, which is about the issue of deferrals and delays. I can give the Minister the good news that Fidelle actually has an appointment now. I would just make the point that…
I raise the matter of the death of Shane O'Farrell in a hit-and-run accident which stole a beautiful 23-year-old son from Lucia and Jim and took a deeply loved brother from his sisters in 2011. The Taoiseach has met the O'Farrell family on a number of occasion…
Last night "RTÉ Investigates" very powerfully demonstrated the horror, trauma and tragedy of the killings of Geraldine O'Reilly, who was 15, and Paddy Stanley, who was 16, in the Belturbet bombings 48 years ago. Nobody has been convicted. To compound the grief…
Parental alienation is probably one of the most severe forms of emotional abuse. Last May, the World Health Organization officially recognised parental alienation syndrome for the first time, deciding to include it in the 11th revision of the International Cla…
One of the biggest impacts on society, particularly for women and children, is the massive surge we have seen in domestic violence. Shocking and disturbing figures have been announced. In the first six months of the pandemic, An Garda Síochána called to more t…
First, I wish to begin by expressing my heartfelt condolences to the family of Ashling Murphy on the tragic passing of their beautiful daughter, who was so full of life and had so much to do in life. There is so much hurt for her family to endure. I wish to ex…
I wish to raise with the Taoiseach ear, nose and throat, ENT, services for children and what is a wholly inadequate number of paediatric ENT consultants covering significant catchment areas. Consequently, we have lengthy waiting periods for children who need a…
The medical board of appeal for primary medical certificates resigned at the beginning of the month. The reason cited for the resignation of the board was a unanimous view that the criteria are too stringent and, in its view, exclude a lot of people who should…
I raise the plight of personal assistants across our education and training board, ETB, sector, who have the same roles and responsibilities as our very hard-working special needs assistants, SNAs. The Minister has been instrumental in regularising their worki…
The Deputy's question is a very serious one and it is on the issue that this Government will be judged on. I have some statistics from the Department, but on the Deputy's specific question, I am not aware of the tenant in situ scheme being suspended. I will sh…
I want to raise the impending wipe out of the pig industry in the very near future if we do not act quickly to plug the hole in the colossal losses engulfing family pig farms around the country. Teagasc has estimated that pig farmers are losing an average of €…
I want to raise the issue of bullying in schools. Sadly, it is a feature of school life that students, teachers and parents face despite the Trojan efforts of pastoral teams, management and teachers in schools to address the scourge of bullying. Social media g…
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.