Paul Kehoe
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 | 680 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 22 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 13 | |
| … 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: 9 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 | 82 | +0.504 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 7 | +0.454 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 6 | +0.608 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 23 | +0.705 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 10 | +0.722 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 9 | +0.891 |
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.
Those convicted by the Special Criminal Court in the past include John Gilligan, Patrick "Dutchy" Holland, Brian Meehan for the murder of Veronica Guerin, Pearse McAuley, Jeremiah Sheehy, Michael O'Neill, Kevin Walsh for the slaying of Detective Garda Jerry Mc…
I want to raise the issue of the very worrying media attention that the Irish Athletic Boxing Association, IABA, has had over the past week, with the latest news of Bernard Dunne’s departure or resignation - call it what you want. This is the third high-perfor…
The Special Criminal Court has been doing a very good job of putting away serious criminals since it was established in 1972. Four men have now been found guilty in the Special Criminal Court of facilitating the 2016 Regency gangland murder. This would not hav…
Something has come to my attention over the past month. I have spoken to some of my colleagues and this is not just an issue in County Wexford. I am talking about accommodation being provided for Ukrainians and for the refugee crisis in both hotels and other a…
Does the Taoiseach share my concerns regarding the decision by RTÉ radio to drop a heavily sanitised interview it had recorded with the former Minister and former Deputy Shane Ross on his new book on Deputy McDonald? RTÉ has some very serious questions to answ…
The Taoiseach will be very much aware of the devastating flooding in County Wexford on 25 December last. In south County Wexford, hundreds of acres of cereals were destroyed. At the time, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine committed to look int…
The Irish tillage sector has faced devastation with the terrible weather conditions, earlier on in sowing and now in harvesting. In County Wexford alone, there are more than 2,500 acres still left to be harvested. With reduced yields and reduced grain prices, …
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.