Patrick Costello
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 | 716 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 20 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 19 | |
| … 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: 1 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 | 240 | +0.367 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 21 | +0.012 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 30 | +0.141 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 6 | +0.171 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 13 | +0.202 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 20 | +0.220 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 5 | +0.390 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 13 | +0.478 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 12 | +0.485 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 24 | +0.493 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 25 | +0.575 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 6 | +0.578 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 5 | +0.659 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 7 | +0.889 |
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.
Unfortunately, based on the Commissioner's public statements, his statements at the committee and his idea that there is no systemic planning and that it is simply a matter of one-off events, I do not share that confidence. Furthermore, it is not just a questi…
I thank the Tánaiste. I find his language quite diplomatic, which is perhaps appropriate given his position, but I tend to agree with Deputy Gannon that we should call things what they are. In the question I have mentioned settlement building, settlement expan…
I rise to discuss the Government's failure regarding the regeneration of social housing communities. This is a major, ongoing issue. It does not just concern the current Government because it is a wider issue. It is highlighted by several key issues and proble…
In my conversations with members of the department of foreign affairs in Sweden, they told me that they had no problem and faced no restrictions. The department of foreign affairs in Sweden told me it faced no problems in terms of its programmes within Palesti…
While I agree with the calls by many of the Deputies here about the importance of increased funding, much of the increased funding going into CAMHS will not make a blind bit of difference if we do not fix many of the structural problems that are there. In my e…
I want to raise the issue of public health nurse, PHN, shortages. There is a general problem with a lack of public health nurses in many areas, but in my constituency, the public health centre on Old County Road has issued a letter that it is suspending develo…
I also raise the Not Our Fault campaign. Many of the affected apartments are in my constituency and I make a point of going out to talk to the campaigners every time they are here. As the previous Deputy said, this is an emergency and funding is needed now. Th…
I raise the issue of the regulation of quad bikes and scramblers after a young toddler ended up in hospital as a result of a crash between a quad bike and a scrambler in a public area in my constituency. This is obviously a wider issue given the fact that two …
Deputy Farrell is taking his time but I will try not to go over my allocation. I welcome the opportunity to speak to this important matter. I used some time last week during the Order of Business to raise related matters. I welcome the Minister's commitment to…
The challenge is that the tangible incentives the Minister for Justice referred to in her prepared response are gone. Moving out of the progression unit means moving from an environment with no drug use to one with significant issues with drug use, and moving …
In the face of Covid, many of the education and training boards, ETBs, delivering prison education services adapted to blended learning, including the use of an in-house television channel. The logical conclusion of this is that we should start to provide in-c…
The reality is that although the SCCs were not struck down in the judgment, they are only valid where it is considered that the data protection controls in place in the third-party country meet the adequacy standard. American data protection standards do not m…
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.