Nicole Ryan
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 | 113 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 48 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 19 | |
| … 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 | 5 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 1 | 0 |
Not scored: 29 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 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 (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support this motion, which is not just welcome but urgently needed. Across the constituency of Cork North-West, from Millstreet to Macroom and Charleville to Ballyvourney, I hear stories from parents and providers alike. Families are under pressure. Parents are going out to work to pay for childcare. In many cases, their monthly fees are higher than their mortgage. For a young mother in Kanturk or father in Newmark…
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 | 179 | +0.366 | +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 | 7 | -0.151 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 10 | +0.100 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 25 | +0.105 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 6 | +0.266 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 25 | +0.280 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 28 | +0.307 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 13 | +0.313 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 6 | +0.333 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 7 | +0.431 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 29 | +0.566 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 7 | +0.726 |
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.
It is great to see the Minister back again. Community safety is a fundamental right. Too often we discuss crime and safety with the focus placed on urban areas. There is no doubt the cities face serious crime issues but the conversation cannot ignore rural Ire…
I thank the Minister of State. I hear what he is saying, but when the Taoiseach himself says that schools are used to appealing, it should not have to get to that point. Schools should not have to appeal these decisions. What happens to those appeals now while…
Nobody is discrediting the work the Minister of State has done and all of that kind of stuff she has been talking about, but the reality on the ground is not what she is saying. It is not. People are dying every single day. I will go back to that dual diagnosi…
It is great to see the Minister in the Chamber again. I welcome her back. This Bill is not just legislation, but a statement of our values as a nation. I thank Senator McDowell and the Independent Group for bringing it forward. It is a recognition that no chil…
I join colleagues in what they said about Senator Boyhan's contribution. I thank him for giving it. You can never beat lived experience. I am here to speak in support of those whose lives have been shaped and often devastated by Ireland's legacy of institution…
I move: Bill entitled an Act to provide for a period of paid leave consequent upon the loss of a pregnancy and for that purpose to amend the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, to extend the protection against unfair dismissals conferred by the Unfair Dismi…
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.