Richard Bruton
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 | 726 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 20 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 18 | |
| … 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: 2 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 level of the shouting down of Government speakers illustrates the motivation behind this debate. This is a reactionary debate. We have heard shrill and strident shouting, hollow slogans and cheap caricatures of the motivations of Government speakers. It does nothing to solve the housing crisis and assures me this is not the time to change Government. There has not been a word about climate, migration or enterpris…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.50) · voted NIL · with their party
I acknowledge the changes the Minister is making. In committee we did quite a bit of work on the circular economy and there is no doubt that a lot of the gains of the circular economy will be achieved by rethinking the design of markets, products and services. It is very important that the Minister has acknowledged that. I might have gone a bit further to acknowledge the way we need to look at things differently. I w…
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 | 472 | +0.495 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 5 | +0.199 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 15 | +0.399 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 8 | +0.463 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 14 | +0.539 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 37 | +0.551 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 7 | +0.578 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 27 | +0.595 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 5 | +0.681 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 5 | +0.688 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 31 | +0.753 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 10 | +0.753 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 25 | +0.790 |
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.
As the Taoiseach and the two Ministers have said, this has been a tragedy of harrowing proportions for the families. It was a Valentine's night that turned to anguish. You can only imagine the panic of people experiencing the chains and padlocks blocking their…
Chonaiceamar radharc uafásach an tseachtain seo caite ar shráideanna Bhaile Átha Cliath. We were all appalled by the scenes on the streets in Dublin last weekend and the violent disorder targeted at the Garda, which has served us so well in this very difficult…
I do not wish to repeat everything that has been said, but what strikes me, apart from the content of this law, which is worrying in itself, is that it is in conflict with the basic law which was the underpinning of the "one country, two systems" principle; th…
As there is new evidence of war crimes in previously-occupied parts of Ukraine, the response from President Putin is to hold four referenda over this weekend in the still-occupied parts of Ukraine to escalate this conflict and declare these Russian territories…
If anyone could be in any doubt about the depth and length of the crisis we are now facing, such doubts were dispelled when war crimes were discovered in areas that President Putin had been forced to abandon. He is now proposing referendums in those occupied t…
While I welcome those general approaches, which are largely EU driven, the reality is that we have the lowest circularity rate in Europe at approximately 1.6%. The average is 11.8%. Only 10% of waste is recovered in the construction sector for any sort of usef…
I thank the Minister of State for his comprehensive reply. Everything he sets out there is on the direction we need to travel but a concern is that there is not the urgency or the momentum to make it really stick. There is still a supply of weapons to the warr…
I appreciate that the Minister is under time pressure but it seems strange that some of the ratios are very low. Even for after-school care, which does not involve infants, the ratios are very low, at 12:1, which seems quite stringent compared with ratios in o…
The key is whether the Government can deliver legislation in time. From listening to what the Minister of State is saying, I believe there are many issues to be resolved. We will not have the legislation for at least 12 months. It is a question of whether the …
The way those targets are evaluated is that it is the cumulative number between 2013 and 2020. It is not the number in 2020. In 2013, 2014 and 2015, we were ahead of target. We were exceeding what was expected, but that, of course, was because of the depressed…
I thank the Minister of State and welcome his acknowledgement that the cost of examinership, running between €80,000 and €130,000 and involving High Court action, is way beyond the scope of most companies. It is estimated that fewer than one quarter of the com…
Ireland has not been good at either constructing buildings or enterprises that put sustainability at their core. We have 50% higher emissions and a low uptake of renewables outside of electricity, poor material and waste management systems and the lowest rate …
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.