Paschal Donohoe
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 | 621 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 71 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 32 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 5 |
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 | 4 | 0 |
Not scored: 39 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 (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I wish to make two points before going into the detail of the issues that have been raised by the Deputies. In the debate that is to ensue regarding the right balance between working at home and working in an office that is generally located in a city, we should acknowledge that there is a value in having city centres that are vibrant and busy. There is a value in that and this is not just an argument about Dublin ci…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted TA · with their party
I will deal with the amendment first and then respond to some of the points that Deputy Doherty made. The local property tax is an important part of our tax system, which has raised more than €6 billion in revenue since it was introduced in 2013. It has provided vital funding for our local government and local services. The Report of the Commission on Taxation and Welfare, published in 2022, acknowledged that local p…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted TA · with their party
To deliver for the housing needs our country has now as well as for the housing needs that will grow into the future, we require the savings of other parts of the world to be invested in building homes in Ireland. That is because, given the size of our economy, the banks we have left, the youth of our population and the homes we will need, we will need savings from elsewhere in order to fund the construction of those…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I appreciate that. I thank the Deputies for the variety of matters they have raised. I will deal with each of them in turn. I will deal first with the amendment tabled by Deputy Doherty. I am very much aware of the issue the Deputy has raised. His point was that different parts of our economy are now beginning the slow journey into recovery at very different speeds. For some parts of our economy that will be a long j…
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 | 1,754 | +0.617 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 18 | +0.428 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 7 | +0.536 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 55 | +0.558 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 87 | +0.594 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 51 | +0.598 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 132 | +0.634 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 8 | +0.683 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 155 | +0.710 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 25 | +0.716 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 5 | +0.719 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 36 | +0.726 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 60 | +0.784 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 9 | +0.800 |
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 was aware of the rates issue and I thank the Deputy for bringing it up. I will have my officials look into it because I appreciate that at this point in the year, given everything that has happened with this disease, the strain and anxiety that smaller hospi…
It is telling and hopeful to hear other Deputies have the courage to make the case for carbon taxing. Some made the case that they think it could be done differently but at least they are making that case. The Rural Independent Group has brought forward propos…
For the avoidance of doubt, all Travellers currently resident at any location should not be evicted during this crisis except where movement is required to ameliorate hardship or to provide protection, subject to consultation with the Travellers involved. The …
-----and the reality I have to a acknowledge in decisions that are being made by the Government. Of course, I have a duty as to how the harm and grave difficulties of the past can be compensated for so those who were hurt and harmed can be recognised in decisi…
The spiking of drinks is a heinous and awful crime. I am very much aware of the threats of violence and intimidation that are caused by those engaged in it. My message to all who fall victim to that appalling criminal practice is to please have trust in our ho…
Many of those proposals were contained in the Sinn Féin budget proposal, which is no longer available. It has disappeared from the party's website. If I want to find out about Sinn Féin's budget proposals for 2022, they are still available. If I want to find o…
That is no surprise given that the motion contains within it a claim that they know is wrong but they still bring it forward, that is, that carbon tax is the key contributing factor to Ireland's cost of living increases. That is wrong and wrong again.…
Sinn Féin makes the same case for every difficulty that is raised with it and every problem to which it seeks to make a difference. Change is not promising everything to everybody. That is not positive change; it is cynicism. It is not change; it is populism. …
I have no doubt at all that upon their return from their efforts on behalf of the people who are subject to such violence, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste will be in a position to give an update to the House. Through our words and actions, we have shown our vie…
Of the money we spent on Covid and supporting our society through a time of such challenge, I am unclear what element of that spending the Deputy was against. Was he against the introduction of the pandemic unemployment payment? Was he against the introduction…
However, we have acted. Ash dieback was not a regulated disease in the European Union when it was detected here and as I understand, it is still not a regulated disease in the EU. Ireland and the United Kingdom were the first countries to introduce emergency n…
There is great value in hope as we look to how we can lead our country through this awful disease but the strategy we have is not based on hope. We have a strategy that is based on putting in place public health guidance with immense resources from our country…
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.