Sharon Keogan
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 | 448 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 201 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 87 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 21 |
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 | 9 | 3 |
| Contradicted their words | 7 | 0 |
Not scored: 114 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 0.90) · voted NIL · with their party
I will continue with my speech. It has been an odd feeling seeing people celebrate receiving their Covid passes online. It is dystopian to see people so glad to be granted this piecemeal freedom by the Government, as if these fundamental rights were its to give and take as it sees fit. However, I do not blame people for grasping at any sliver of hope that might allow them finally escape the miasma of fear that has de…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
My amendment No. 24 proposes to insert a three-year sunset clause and a mandatory operational review framework into Part IIIA of the Defence Act 1954, as inserted by section 9 of the Bill, directly addressing the State's expanding powers regarding the Defence Forces' deployment in aid of the civil power. Let me be clear. I support the broad principles of the Bill and I welcome the codification and modernisation of ou…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit ar an tráthnóna breá seo. I felt I had to say something in Irish after hearing the beautiful Irish of Senator Kelleher. I broadly support the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) (Amendment) Bill. This is necessary and timely legislation. The nature of terrorism has changed dramatically in recent years. It is no longer confined to organised groups operating in defined territories. I…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
Anyone who knows me knows that I am an ardent supporter of empowering local government, whether through greater technical and financial support or by granting greater powers to local authorities. However, while I support this Bill in spirit, after consulting several councillors, I will raise some questions and give constructive feedback. I and councillors to whom I have spoken find the Bill, though brief, to be very …
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted TA · with their party
The Minister of State is very welcome. I am pleased to support the motion put down by the Labour Party and the amendment tabled by my colleague, Senator Craughwell. Community safety and investment is of paramount importance to ensure a thriving, safe and healthy society. The Trojan work done by An Garda Síochána has never been of more vital importance than in recent years. Community unrest is palpable in our country.…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.85) · voted NIL · with their party
I welcome the Minister of State. I support Senator Boyhan. Indeed, I signed the amendment as well. I am astonished that the former county councillors in the Chamber - I presume there are three - would support getting rid of the mandatory public meeting from the democratic process. The people of Ireland do not have much say anymore. The Covid health legislation and regulations that the Houses have introduced have prov…
Read as support (cue, confidence 0.75) · voted NIL · with their party
I rise today in support of this motion not because I agree with the proposers on everything - far from it - but because on this issue they are right. Budget 2026 has failed Irish families. It has failed mothers and fathers who are working every hour they can just to afford the privilege of placing their children in the care they need so that they can work in the first place. It has failed our children, who deserve nu…
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 | 956 | +0.270 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 19 | -0.259 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 54 | -0.076 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 37 | +0.091 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 79 | +0.146 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 35 | +0.200 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 66 | +0.216 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 85 | +0.231 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 97 | +0.268 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 33 | +0.320 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 134 | +0.402 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 16 | +0.421 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 36 | +0.433 |
| Media, banking and State companies ireland · irish · media · industry · companies · post | 11 | +0.451 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 23 | +0.540 |
| Local government, roads and regional funding county · cork · discuss · west · road · local | 7 | +0.552 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 35 | +0.558 |
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 26 | +0.597 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 25 | +0.625 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 25 | +0.707 |
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.
They are all being discussed together but I have quite a long list of amendments so I want to try to get in as many as I can. On amendment No. 5, the current definition of "hatred" that exists is too loose. The current definition gives too much power to the ga…
"Go woke or go broke" appears to have been the strategy of Fianna Fáil in recent years. This is another example of that pathetic strategy. Devoid of any true guiding principles, languishing on an historic low of 11% in the opinion polls and registering a paltr…
The Women's Aid 2024 annual report published last week paints a harrowing picture of domestic abuse in this country. Among the most disturbing findings is that 188 pregnant, post-partum or post-termination women were supported by Women's Aid last year due to i…
I draw urgent attention to the worsening catastrophe and crackdown in Iran. Following mass demonstrations since late December, the regime's response has been one of breathtaking brutality. Credible monitoring reports estimate that over 25,000 protesters have b…
Thank you. But in the next breath, TDs fall over themselves to denounce the phantom far right in connection with the horrific burning of an IPAS centre in Drogheda only for it to emerge that the alleged arsonists were linked to organised crime and the attack w…
I rise today with a deep sense of outrage. I am not concerned or irritated, but outraged at the steady interference of the European Union in democratic elections, including our own. In the recent report on communications between big tech and the European Commi…
Today I rise to speak for the voiceless, those 200,000 Irish citizens, many of them in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, who were sold out by their own Government and financial institutions. These are not reckless borrowers; these are neighbours, pensioners and par…
Only a fortnight ago, I spoke about the serious failures of the Children's Rights Alliance to review Tusla's performance and I highlighted concerns that there were serious gaps appearing in the Tusla system, leaving hundreds of children vulnerable. Considering…
I rise to address two issues arising from recent debates at local authority level which point to deeper problems in how we approach governance and accountability. The first comes from Kerry County Council where councillors debated whether the State should coll…
I rise today to highlight a deeply troubling issue in our family courts, namely, the misuse of the concept of parent alienation. Yesterday, I attended a presentation by the Alliance of Birth Mothers Campaigning for Justice. What I heard was harrowing. They tol…
Prison numbers in our country at this time have hit 5,000. Many of our 14 prisons are overcrowded. We talk about crime here every day, including judges making the wrong decision in respect of crime, but perhaps they make those decisions because there is nowher…
I rise to address the ongoing disruption caused by the Opposition parties in the Dáil. Last week, after weeks of obstruction over a question of eight minutes, the Opposition continued its childish behaviour by walking out during Deputy Nolan's speaking time. W…
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.