Simon Coveney
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 | 506 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 14 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 13 | |
| … 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: 1 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 1 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 | 1,383 | +0.623 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 6 | +0.278 |
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 5 | +0.281 |
| War, Ukraine, Israel and human rights international · ireland · ukraine · israel · war · irish | 54 | +0.459 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 30 | +0.495 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 61 | +0.667 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 5 | +0.723 |
| Justice, policing and defence garda · defence · justice · violence · criminal · gardaí | 24 | +0.758 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 19 | +0.799 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 98 | +0.816 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 36 | +0.816 |
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 am deeply concerned by the escalation of violence in Jerusalem in recent days, the launching of rockets from Gaza and the actions of the Israeli defence forces. Many were shocked at reports of 24 Palestinians being killed last night, including nine children.…
This is an horrific war. We may have seen up to 250,000 people killed already, and perhaps 200,000 of those have been military personnel on both sides. It is hard to know what the figure is in respect of civilian losses, but it could be anything between 40,000…
I answered this question earlier. It is useful to have a channel of communication that allows us to communicate in no uncertain terms what we think of Russia's position on Ukraine and its aggression and invasion of a sovereign neighbour. We called the Russian …
It is helpful to put some facts on the record, or certainly as they are understood. Food insecurity continues to be of serious concern. Over 5.2 million people are in need of emergency food aid right now. Alarmingly, the United Nations Office for the Coordinat…
I was concerned at what we were all seeing on our phones and television screens about what was unfolding in Iran, so I requested the Iranian ambassador to come in to explain what was going on in his country and to express my concern and condemnation for what I…
The French finance minister can say whatever he wants but our Government has not had a recommendation yet as the basis for a decision. With regard to Deputy Collins' question, I have met many of the families who were deeply impacted by the Whiddy Island disast…
I have just told the Deputy about a range of things we have been doing in terms of raising the matter. However, Ireland does not control the foreign policy decisions of other countries. We try to make arguments that can build consensus around international act…
I think it is pretty clear where the Irish people stand on this issue. I speak to the ambassador, Mr. Crawford, quite regularly. I do not have a scheduled call with him, but I would not be surprised if I were to speak to him in the next week or so. What Irish …
My focus is to do everything we can as a country and as a member of the European Union to bring this war to an end and to promote democracy in Belarus to ensure that the people there get the government and the president they elect, as opposed to skewed electio…
As the Deputy knows, Ireland does not decide on arms embargoes. The trade policy of the European Union is decided collectively. It is proposed by the Commission and debated by member states. We had a very good debate on the Amnesty International report in this…
There has been a steep deterioration in the situation in Belarus since Alexander Lukashenko’s fraudulent re-election as president in August 2020. Tens of thousands of Belarusians protested in response, calling for fair elections, justice and a better future. T…
We are dealing with two slightly separate issues. First is the concern that Senators understandably have that one person is simply making decisions about patients without any other input. That is not what is being proposed. The note I have regards clinical inp…
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.