Stephen Donnelly
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 | 657 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 31 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 20 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 6 |
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 | 4 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 11 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 (mover, confidence 0.95) · voted NIL · with their party
I move amendment No. 19: In page 45, between lines 10 and 11, to insert the following: “PART 5 OPEN DISCLOSURE OF PART 5 REVIEWS Part 5 review 35. (1) A patient may request a review (in this Act referred to as a “request for a Part 5 review”) of the results of a screening which has been carried out by a cancer screening service in relation to the patient. (2) A request for a Part 5 review shall be made in writing to …
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.89) · voted TA · with their party
I acknowledge the point made by Deputies Duncan Smith and Naughten. We need a medium- to long-term approach. It does not work for anybody to keep going through cycle after cycle and I am open to meeting with Deputies to discuss it. We are thinking through more medium-term responses, operationally, but I would be open to any ideas from the Oireachtas. Obviously, the reason we are in here again and again is we have put…
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 | 1,951 | +0.559 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Party-political exchange (party names dominate) workers · rights · right · sinn · féin · irish | 10 | +0.172 |
| Health scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 36 | +0.419 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 35 | +0.550 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 236 | +0.628 |
| Covid-19 and public health emergency covid · health · public · pandemic · measures · safety | 284 | +0.628 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 153 | +0.641 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 274 | +0.692 |
| Employment, welfare schemes and business supports scheme · businesses · payment · sector · employment · insurance | 10 | +0.757 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 6 | +0.766 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 78 | +0.818 |
| EU and international relations ireland · european · irish · union · europe · countries | 15 | +0.885 |
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 thank the Deputy for tabling this question. The National Cancer Registry Ireland reported that about one quarter of all cancers diagnosed between 2019 and 2021 were non-melanoma skin cancers. Melanoma of skin accounted for one in 20 of the remaining invasive…
I thank the Deputy for the question, which is on a matter that is very close to my heart. The advancement of cancer services for patients in Ireland is a priority for me and the Government. The Deputy will be aware that we allocated €40 million to the national…
I am more than happy to chase that up. Many hospitals have arrangements whereby patients coming in for serious treatment get a card to avoid car parking charges entirely. It is different for different hospitals but if the Deputy sends me the details I will loo…
I will not respond on behalf of myself but the Senator has described me, the Government and all sorts of people as corrupt and liars and in the pockets of people for some bizarre reason. As the Minister for Health, I must object to the Senator describing offic…
That is something we can look at. The determinant is not only age. There is the underlying medical conditions group, which is quite a big group. That was the recommendation from NIAC, based on the principles it put together. Obviously many people are asking si…
Deputy Boyd Barrett talked about unity and solidarity. He said he does not want people to fall for the tricks of the far right and then he laid out tricks of the far left. He said we should not conflate real social problems that everyone in this House cares ab…
Therefore, I will respond directly to the false claims and challenge that Senator Mullen put forward. He asked for me to refer to one registered healthcare provider. I refer to the HSE, which I hope Senator Mullen will accept is a registered bona fide healthca…
-----and say there is no place in our country for racism, there is no place in this country for xenophobia and those who protest at places where children have fled from war in Ukraine. Those who protest outside on the streets are cowards and thugs in my opinio…
I thank the Deputy. There is a really interesting discussion that we are beginning to have around vaccine certificates or, as the Deputy said, not necessarily just that but it could also be negative PCR tests. We have seen very interesting pilots in Israel, fo…
I saw the report. We are acutely aware of the costs for cancer patients and indeed for patients across the country. We have taken numerous steps. We reduced the threshold for the drug payment scheme from €114 to €80, we abolished pediatric hospital charges and…
The vicious attack on three young children and their care worker last Thursday night was horrific. It was beyond every parent's worst nightmare and our thoughts are with the children, the woman who was attacked and their families. As Minister for Health, I tha…
The service line is essentially a subset of the national cancer strategy, so any funding we get will be in the context of funding through next year for the national cancer strategy. There is also a separate funding line for the genetics and genomic strategy, 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.