Sean Fleming
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 | 1,069 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 12 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 4 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 0 |
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: 8 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 2 where no clear position was stated in the debate.
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 | 666 | +0.606 | +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 | -0.030 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 25 | +0.416 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 14 | +0.542 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 90 | +0.564 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 53 | +0.570 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 138 | +0.651 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 45 | +0.668 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 18 | +0.684 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 28 | +0.700 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 23 | +0.732 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 21 | +0.737 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 106 | +0.741 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 9 | +0.742 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 31 | +0.834 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 10 | +0.875 |
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.
The Government is deeply concerned by the continued threat posed by terrorism and violent extremism to peace and security around the world, including on the African continent. The recent UN report referred to by the Deputy makes the case clearly that terrorism…
We work closely with our EU colleagues in all of these situations. The way it generally works is that some countries are better positioned to help individual countries. This may depend on their diplomatic and political relationship over many years. Some countr…
I thank the Deputy for raising this matter regarding the ongoing challenges to the taxi industry posed by illegal operators, which I will answer on behalf of the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan. The regulation of the SPSV industry, including enforcement and compli…
As everybody knows, on 8 September, Morocco experienced a major earthquake, which killed almost 3,000 people and injured 5,000 others. Two days later, Storm Daniel struck Libya, with flash floods affecting wide areas in the east of the country, including the c…
I will put this on record so people listening and following this will get an understanding of what we are talking about. "Unplanned" means nobody knows this would happen until it actually does, as opposed to planned outages. I note that in Kildare town and out…
We will continue to assist households in dealing with the cost of living where it is possible to do so. It is imperative that policies are designed in a manner that does not increase inflation. Putting more Government and taxpayer money into the economy to try…
The amendment seeks to remove one element of the segregated nature of sub-funds. If accepted, it would adversely affect the segregation of liability between the sub-funds that this legislation seeks to establish. It would result in inconsistency between other …
Yes, if such a person controls 25% of the vote in the limited partner. I am not talking about the general partner who runs the whole business but the limited partner. Yes, he or she is a beneficial owner but it does not give him or her control of the general p…
Of course, everybody knows that the past six months have been difficult, as the next six months will be. We have been here a few times as a result of Covid-19. There was the July stimulus package and now the Finance Bill, with billions of euro going to support…
As the Senator rightly pointed out, there are additional difficulties in northern Syria because of the war there, which has been going on for years. It is hard to know who is in control of the region. There is a government in place but it is not strong in the …
I understand completely Deputy Sherlock's statement and his impatience about particular actions being taken at this point. I have explained why we are taking this correct route. I would prefer to gather more information and base any legislative proposals on cl…
A total of 65 fixed penalty payment notices were issued in 2022 and 146 prosecutions were taken at the District Court. In 2022, the NTA initiated 54 prosecutions of individuals operating an entirely unlicensed SPSV service without either an SPSV driver licence…
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.