Richard Boyd Barrett
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 | 818 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 248 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 141 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 18 |
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 | 16 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 107 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
Since I entered the Dáil in 2011, I have been railing against the policies pursued by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, the Fine Gael-Independents Government and the current Government in that they have actively encouraged vulture and cuckoo funds to come in and take over what was virtually the entire NAMA portfolio. Now they are coming in to buy up new estates and they are pricing the first-time buyer or ordina…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.75) · voted NIL · with their party
I ask the Taoiseach to make a public statement directed at the German Government in support of Daniel Tatlow-Devally who is an Irish citizen who has been incarcerated along with four other fellow activists in a German high security prison for 11 months. He is going on trial next Monday because he was involved in a direct action against Elbit Systems that produces weapons in Germany for the Israeli regime and its geno…
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 | 2,499 | -0.170 | +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 | 18 | -0.600 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 113 | -0.583 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 14 | -0.550 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 184 | -0.357 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 33 | -0.356 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 76 | -0.252 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 37 | -0.153 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 71 | -0.113 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 182 | -0.078 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 13 | -0.072 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 139 | +0.048 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 41 | +0.064 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 16 | +0.129 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 42 | +0.133 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 85 | +0.189 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 37 | +0.213 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 33 | +0.364 |
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.