Shane Curley
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 | 191 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 27 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 11 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 1 |
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 | 1 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 16 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 0 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 | 106 | +0.447 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Irish-language contributions (sorted by language, not policy) agus · seo · leis · sin · atá · bhfuil | 6 | -0.290 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 9 | +0.359 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 25 | +0.389 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 16 | +0.429 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 8 | +0.481 |
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.
Mar a dúirt an Cathaoirleach Ghníomhach, níor chóir don Aire Stáit a bheith róchrua air féin. Tá an-Ghaeilge aige agus rinne sé iarracht. Is é sin an rud is tábhachtaí, sé sin go bhfuil sé feiceálach agus é ag úsáid na Gaeilge. Gabhaim buíochas leis as ucht a …
Bhí comhrá againn sa choiste Gaeilge an tseachtain seo caite maidir leis an nGaeilge ag an tríú leibhéal agus líon na gcúrsaí atá ar fáil trí Ghaeilge. An rud is mó a sheas amach domsa ná taobh amuigh de chúrsaí oideachais agus an Ghaeilge mar chúrsa faoi leit…
Tá rud éigin le rá agam faoi Uisce Éireann. I want to raise the issue of Uisce Éireann's communications, particularly with public representatives. Not alone have we had reports in the House about its communication with Oireachtas representatives but I am now g…
Luaigh an tAire na deacrachtaí agus na dúshláin atá romhainn maidir leis an nGaeilge, chomh maith leis an ngluaiseacht atá ann chun an Ghaeilge a bheith níos forleithne sa tír. Ag an am céanna, áfach, is tábhachtach an dea-obair atá déanta ag an Aire a aithint…
Last week, I sat with a family devastated by the effects of HHC. For people who may not be aware of it, HHC is a synthetic drug which is widely available in vapes from vape shops in cities, towns and villages throughout the country. HHC is consumed through nor…
First, I pay tribute to former Senator and MEP Brian Crowley and extend my sympathies to his family and to the Cathaoirleach at this difficult time. Today the State Examinations Commission, SEC, published the guidelines for extra time in this year's leaving an…
I am not a history teacher, but a few years ago I had the opportunity to teach the concept of genocide as part of third year history. The example we used at the time was the Srebrenica massacre in the former Yugoslavia. It was a hard thing to teach, to show vi…
I thank the Minister of State. I have to be brutally honest. As a language teacher myself, that is not a good enough response. It is coming from the SEC. I know it is not the Minister who is directly responding there - she has to liaise with the SEC to be able…
It is good news in one way that there is acknowledgement from the Department that there is an issue with the entrance exam system. I welcome that. The only bad news from the response is that the only thing worse than the HPAT is the leaving certificate. They a…
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.