Steven Matthews
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 | 1,140 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 29 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 13 | |
| … position stated clearly enough to score | 3 |
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 | 2 | 0 |
Not scored: 16 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 oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
First, I thank the Minister for introducing amendments Nos. 9 and 14, which go a good way to meeting the objectives of the amendments Deputy Duffy and I previously submitted. This shows that if parties and Members are willing to work with the Minister to improve this legislation, and they are committed to delivering badly needed housing at scale that is affordable and well-designed, then the Minister is willing to wo…
Read as oppose (cue, confidence 0.90) · voted TA · with their party
I thank Deputy Mattie McGrath for reminding me that An Taisce is a prescribed body in respect of planning regulations. It would be a good move for the Land Development Agency to also become a prescribed body to enable it to be made aware of the submission of planning applications which may border or impact public lands. It is something I will discuss with the Minister and is an aspect which may be introduced under pl…
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 | 215 | +0.665 | +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 |
|---|---|---|
| Education and schools school · education · schools · children · students · special | 10 | +0.565 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 24 | +0.627 |
| Housing, rent and homelessness housing · homes · local · accommodation · rent · affordable | 8 | +0.640 |
| Climate, agriculture, energy and water water · climate · farmers · energy · food · agriculture | 30 | +0.689 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 20 | +0.690 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 15 | +0.828 |
| Cost of living, tax and budget cost · tax · budget · energy · costs · increase | 7 | +0.911 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 12 | +0.936 |
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 Minister. I am reassured to know there is such action on fireworks. I was at Crumlin children's hospital late one night and the amount of fireworks going off was an absolute disgrace. I do not know what kind of an idiot sets off fireworks near a ch…
I want to ask the Minister if her attention has been drawn to recent media reports of sex for rent cases. I refer particularly to reports by a journalist in the Irish Examiner , Ann Murphy. Are there specific measures or legislation to address this crime, if i…
The housing crisis is the foremost challenge we face. I notice that most of the Opposition Front Bench is missing, including its spokesperson, deputy leader and leader. It is a pity they did not stay for the complete debate.…
I hope the Leas-Cheann Comhairle will add the time on for the constant interruptions. If the Opposition would care to listen to some of the facts and information, we need to revitalise our town centres and address dereliction and vacancy. The tenure mix will b…
I hope the Minister of State will get a chance to correct some of the statements made during the previous contribution. It is always disappointing to come in here and hear the type of attacks that go on against our environmental non-governmental organisations,…
In the week of COP26, when the nations of the world have come together to address the climate emergency, we should not forget the other emergency, the biodiversity emergency. I would like to ask the Minister about the role of biodiversity officers in local aut…
I am also asking the Minister a question on the pandemic unemployment payment where persons are currently in receipt of that payment and are offered short-term temporary work. This is especially the case in the music industry, where a gig may happen and they w…
I welcome the opportunity to make statements on water policy. Despite many of the complaints I hear about Irish Water and individual towns and locations, we need to look at this in a broader perspective. We would all have been taught about the hydrological cyc…
The average age in this House is 50. I checked that earlier today. Most of us will not be around when the real horrors of climate change hit this country, when farmers are having difficulty farming on flooded lands, when sea levels rise in our coastal communit…
I have been listening to the debate from my office and we have all experienced many of the complaints and issues raised by Members across the House. One of the issues that really frustrates us as public representatives is the poor communication response we get…
I was probably finished with the Deputy well before I started this speech. I have listened to planners being criticised in council chambers and up and down the country for the decisions that they make. The planners do not plan decisions out of thin air. The pl…
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.