Paul Daly
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 | 539 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 45 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 16 | |
| … 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 | 3 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 3 | 0 |
Not scored: 29 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 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 oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I welcome the Minister. It seems a little bit repetitive because the agriculture committee meeting was only yesterday evening and we are dealing with the same topic, so it seems like we are repeating ourselves, but when something is important enough to say, it is important enough to say it more than once. I welcome the fund. As I stated yesterday evening and even though most people know, it would be remiss of me not …
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I am delighted to support the motion to extend the upper ceiling for the Horse and Greyhound Racing Fund. I welcome the Minister and his contribution. Four minutes is a short time to speak so I will not rehash the figures and the investment into the fund, and the great role that it plays in rural Ireland. Most, if not all, horse and greyhound trainers are based in rural areas. Having a horse or greyhound trainer can …
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.21) · voted TA · with their party
I welcome the Bill. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, who has replaced the Minister, Deputy Browne. I compliment both of them along with their officials on taking the steps they did. It is very hard to bring in any legislation which will only have long-term benefits. Some people want to see the gold-plated results the next day and if they do not, they will not make a decision at all. I compliment the M…
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 | 208 | +0.505 | +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 | 5 | +0.028 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 45 | +0.364 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 91 | +0.503 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 10 | +0.565 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 6 | +0.626 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 6 | +0.726 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 6 | +0.831 |
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 accept the Minister of State's answer. As I said in my initial summation of the issue, the Department at least needs to put the question to Europe. A lot of money is available and is being expended. Neither the State nor the European Union is getting full va…
I wish to raise an issue that is of major concern to me and rural Ireland. It is of concern on a broader scale as well. I refer to the control of the noxious weed called ragwort. Anyone who travels on a road will see this yellow weed and to the uninformed, it …
Today, I raise an issue that I have raised previously. Almost every other colleague has raised it before too. It is the infamous issue of passports. We have got away from the pandemic and the backlog it caused. Everyone was given the benefit of the doubt in th…
I thank the Minister of State for his response. The kernel of the response was on what was in place before and has expired, and that was the bounty scheme. With the greatest respect to the NPWS and its implementation of the invasive species Acts, identifying a…
I second the motion. I thank our leader, Senator O'Loughlin, and everybody involved in putting the motion together. On 26 February 2022, my father died, four days after the outbreak of the current part of this war because that was not the start of this war, as…
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Taoiseach. There will be no element of surprise; I will be boringly predictable in mentioning agriculture. When I have to condense all that goes therewith into two minutes, I think the buck stops with forestry at the moment. When we talk…
I wish to be associated with the expressions of sympathy on the passing of Tras Honan. While I did not know Tras, I knew her sister, Carrie Acheson, very well through my involvement with the National Ploughing Championships. I send my sympathies to the entire …
We are debating over and back. We will not complete Committee Stage tonight and it will need to be resumed on another date. We will then have Report Stage. The three people we are discussing do not even have a date. Can we give them an indication? Once this le…
Like others this morning, I welcome the announcement of the €79.5 million towards the crop affected by ash dieback and the growers who have been affected big-time on this. It is an issue I have raised previously. I warmly welcome today's announcement which wil…
We will now deal with No. 5, motion regarding the continuance of the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1998 and No. 6, motion regarding the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act 2009. Both motions will be debated together and decided separately. I call on …
I will raise what is a very serious issue for me and many others out there. We are fortunate that we had no fatalities on our roads on the back of Storm Debi over the weekend. I have no doubt that, if we had, I would not be the only one raising the issue of as…
I raise with the Leader the ongoing issue of long waiting times for driving tests. I base this on an article in today's The Journal under the headline, "Crackdown on long-held provisional licenses delayed over fears of longer test waiting lists". It refers to …
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.