Shane Moynihan
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 | 394 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 4 | |
| … 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: 0 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 | 178 | +0.668 | +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 | 5 | +0.174 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 6 | +0.651 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 9 | +0.785 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 5 | +0.809 |
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.
I raise the issue of the industrial action being taken by staff at Oberstown Children Detention Campus. The facility looks after some of our most vulnerable children who have found themselves in a particular set of circumstances. Care is provided by social car…
I thank the Deputy for her question. The students, prospective students and teachers are in a very difficult situation. What is really important now is that we have a clear information stream going to the students so they know what is going on. The Department …
I have raised this question before in the House. It relates to the British Government's response to the State's ongoing request for full disclosure and access to all relevant documentation concerning the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 17 May 1974. We had the …
As students navigate increasingly complex issues around mental health, relationships, identity and online safety, the feedback I am getting from teachers in my own constituency of Dublin Mid-West is that they do not feel prepared or trained on how to address a…
I noted the Taoiseach's recent comments on e-scooters. I have raised this with him on a number of occasions. I cycle to Leinster House when I can, and I am a big supporter of the active travel agenda. However, I think there is now an emergency with regard to e…
Is mór agam an deis seo a thapú labhairt ar cheist na Gaeilge agus na Gaeltachta tráthnóna. I dtosach báire, ba mhaith liom comhghairdeas oifigiúil a dhéanamh le hAire nua na Gaeltachta. Seo hé an chéad deis dom é a dhéanamh ar úrláir na Dála. Is as Contae Mha…
The territorial integrity of any nation state is a sacrosanct principle and should guide any of our interventions in the area of foreign policy. What preparations are being made by the Government in terms of the overall reparations that need to be made to the …
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.