Paula Butterly
Not yet computed for this member.
The alignment pipeline has not produced a score here. That is usually because this member never spoke in a debate section that went to a division with an attributable question — see the coverage table below.
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 | 99 | +0.507 | +0.423 |
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.
We are always asking responsible landowners to act as custodians of the land and to act responsibly by following the regulations as set out by the Minister in regard to burning and taking those preventative steps. However, at the same time they are also expose…
Drogheda has experienced deep and persistent challenges linked to intergenerational addiction, domestic abuse and violence, particularly in communities that have faced long-term social and economic disadvantage. The Drogheda Implementation Board was a welcome …
There are many aspects of this Bill that I welcome. In particular, in relation to so-called sex for rent, I welcome the protections that will be afforded to people who are victims of such behaviour by ruthless landlords. I also welcome the detail in regard to …
I thank the Minister for that comprehensive answer. I understand fully the conflict he will face in trying to balance these rights. However, I want to point out the purpose of counselling notes. These notes are confidential. The are about helping victims on th…
Childhood memories should be nuggets of joy and flashbacks of events evoked by the smells, words or actions of others and of happier times. They should make us laugh and smile when we remember. They should be a guide for us, if or when, we are lucky enough to …
I raise the lack of a driving test centre in Drogheda town. Louth Deputies have beaten a path to the RSA over the years and have continuously raised this issue in the Chamber. All they have ever received are generic replies stating that the Office of Public Wo…
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.