Patricia Stephenson
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 | 178 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 99 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 30 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 8 |
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 | 7 | 0 |
Not scored: 69 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
The Minister of State is asking to us support a Bill that erodes basic human dignity and environmental protections and basically gives carte blanche to developers to hide the fact that his Government is a serial failure when it comes to housing. We are asked to support a Bill that will lower housing standards at a time people are struggling to find homes that support basic well-being. He did not like the critique of …
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I welcome the survivors and their supporters to the Chamber. They have been following this through the Dáil and the Seanad and will, I am sure, continue to follow this issue closely. The Labour amendment that was brought in last week and co-developed with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre was a compromise but the Minister would not meet survivors and front-line response services halfway with that amendment. For that reas…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I will speak to amendment No. 5 around international agreements, conventions and treaties, the Paris Agreement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Aarhus Convention, etc. This amendment is born out of the regulatory concerns we spoke about before, particularly in the context of regulatory chill and the impact this could have on environmental legislation. Under the Energy Charter Treaty, ECT, we saw comp…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I am pulling on what Senator McCarthy said about Ireland's commitment to human rights not being theoretical but put into practice. That is why I very much welcome Senator Boyhan's amendment. I have similar amendments later on, but in case we do not get to them, I am choosing to speak on some of them now because they are related. We heard from the Tánaiste last year that: The ECHR’s guarantees cannot be negotiated awa…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I share Senator Clonan's frustration at timed amendments. It is hard to come into the Chamber with ideas, solutions and progressive policies and legislation only for these to be delayed time and again. There will always be a reason to delay any individual Bill but as we hear this for every Opposition Bill, it is hard to take seriously any specific justification other than a desire to kick it down the road and put it …
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I know the Minister of State wants us to move on, and I will let other Opposition Members speak for themselves, but I was not suggesting we should legislate to hold children for 72 hours. The fact is the legislation does not commit to not holding children in adult units for any period of time. I was supporting the idea of having a compromise within the legislation. By no means was I suggesting we should provide in an…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
Yes. I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Defamation (Amendment) Bill. The Bill is both necessary and overdue and I welcome steps being taken to modernise our defamation laws and rebalance the rights of freedom of expression and the right to a good name and to respond to the rapidly evolving digital environment. However, while I welcome elements of the Bill, it is a missed opportunity in some key respects, parti…
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 | 357 | +0.178 | +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 | 9 | -0.453 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 16 | -0.323 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 52 | -0.110 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 39 | +0.017 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 12 | +0.061 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 17 | +0.277 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 14 | +0.357 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 6 | +0.403 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 14 | +0.462 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 41 | +0.489 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 11 | +0.513 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 13 | +0.565 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 60 | +0.567 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 12 | +0.688 |
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.