Pauline O'Reilly
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 | 361 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 91 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 26 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 2 |
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 | 0 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 65 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 0.85) · voted TA · with their party
The Minister is welcome. I have spoken on this issue before. I will specifically talk about the greyhound industry. To be fair to Senator Daly, he has acknowledged this is a difficult issue for me and a difficulty with being in government. There are certain things we did not get in the programme for Government. We as a party are not supportive of the greyhound industry. It is in our manifesto that we believe in the p…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.80) · voted NIL · with their party
To first address the Bill on safe access zones, as the Cathaoirleach will know, I am a co-signatory so I very much hope that we can pass the Bill on Thursday. I also welcome Senator Clonan and congratulate all of those who ran. It was a stellar performance by an awful lot of people, including members of my party. I congratulate them for putting themselves forward. I am sure we will see them again in the future. I wil…
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 | 394 | +0.594 | +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 | 5 | -0.246 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 9 | +0.046 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 15 | +0.243 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 43 | +0.498 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 9 | +0.557 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 10 | +0.567 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 14 | +0.571 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 25 | +0.616 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 167 | +0.654 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 18 | +0.689 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 6 | +0.692 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 20 | +0.700 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 39 | +0.712 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 11 | +0.749 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 12 | +0.753 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 7 | +0.764 |
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.
Lockdown has left us with a legacy of domestic violence. Early in lockdown, I spoke extensively about this issue and warned of the dangers, as did many of the organisations who deal with it on a daily basis. It became a powder keg for already difficult situati…
I raise last night's "RTÉ Investigates" programme. There is a group of people who are vilified, sidelined, silenced and at times ridiculed, namely, those advocating for animal welfare. What the programme showed is the resilience that this group has in pursuing…
I wish to bring the attention of the House to the high number of dialysis patients in Ireland who have contracted Covid-19. I was contacted late last night by a person who appeared on the RTÉ "Prime Time" programme last night. Some Senators may have seen it. T…
Last week, we all witnessed the devastating fire in Lesbos, which again brought into sharp focus conditions in the Moria camp, particularly for children. In light of the announcement yesterday by the Minister with responsibility for children, Deputy Roderic O'…
I am delighted that this Bill has reached this Stage. I thank Senator Chambers for pursuing it doggedly to get to this point. It has proceeded quite quickly and I do not think it would have proceeded to this Stage if not for her determination. The reason the B…
It seems that a lot of the amendments are about removing things. They are about removing open market dwellings from the list of affordability and now removing the LDA. The LDA exists so why not use it? This is not even saying we should dismantle the Land Devel…
I will speak on amendment No. 4 proposed by Sinn Féin. We need to be careful that we are not saying there is anything inherently wrong with more of one gender than another being in part-time employment. Throughout the State we can look and survey and have CSO …
I join all my colleagues in congratulating Deputy Bacik. I was lucky to be here with her last week for the Gender Pay Gap Information Bill. She participated in that and had done so much to get it over the line. It was fitting that her last contribution was dur…
I am skipping other Senators' speaking slots because I am stepping in for the Cathaoirleach, who has to leave presently. I thank all the members of the committee, several of whom are here for this debate, for their work on this, in particular the Chairman. Apa…
I take up the point made by a previous speaker blaming the Green Party for closing the Shannon LNG facility. It is not the Green Party's fault that there is climate change or that all of us must take responsibility and act on it. That is why we are in the Gove…
I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach for allowing me to speak and I thank the Minister of State for returning to the Chamber. Some Senators have suggested she may be bamboozled. I think it may actually be the case that many of the Members are allowing themselves to…
The Minister is welcome. I thank the Chair of our committee, Deputy Kehoe. I have enjoyed sitting on the committee. We work well as a team and do in-depth work. Some of the other committee members have spoken before me. It has been eye-opening to see things fr…
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.