Paul Murphy
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 | 930 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 142 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 93 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 7 |
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 | 5 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 49 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 support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I support for the call for statements on Pride. I also call for a debate and a motion to be brought forward by the Government, if it wants us to sign up to this European armament programme called SAFE. It is part of ReArm Europe, and entails €150 billion worth of loans, effectively to be paid for by the public into the pockets of the armaments industry in Europe. It was announced on Friday that the Irish Government a…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.45) · voted NIL · with their party
Legislation to abolish the triple lock is included in the spring legislative programme. The Nice treaty would not have passed in a referendum the second time around without the national declaration promising to retain the triple lock the Government lodged alongside it. Will the Government hold a referendum on the triple lock before attempting to pass legislation here to abolish it? Is the plan to force abolition thro…
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 | 2,031 | -0.044 | +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 | 24 | -0.617 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 50 | -0.300 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 12 | -0.222 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 28 | -0.210 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 53 | -0.113 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 7 | -0.092 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 147 | -0.035 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 42 | -0.025 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 20 | -0.018 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 71 | +0.045 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 44 | +0.056 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 109 | +0.097 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 46 | +0.115 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 101 | +0.131 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 41 | +0.141 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 33 | +0.169 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 10 | +0.392 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 6 | +0.565 |
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.