Teresa Costello
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 | 192 | |
| … spoke in that debate section | 23 | |
| … vote tied to a specific question | 9 | |
| … 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 | 1 | 0 |
| Contradicted their words | 0 | 0 |
Not scored: 14 where the vote could not be tied to a question, 8 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 | 139 | +0.482 | +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 scandals, inquiries and bereaved families hospital · families · family · cancer · children · did | 19 | +0.144 |
| Children, families and young people children · women · young · child · family · families | 33 | +0.364 |
| Transport, Dublin and rural development local · transport · dublin · city · public · community | 14 | +0.462 |
| Procedural and rhetorical filler (low-content) important · like · good · debate · did · does | 29 | +0.546 |
| Health services, HSE and disability health · services · care · service · hse · mental | 29 | +0.600 |
| Departmental programmes and funding (diffuse) department · national · funding · new · important · programme | 18 | +0.769 |
| Legislation, courts and legal process act · legislation · shall · court · person · information | 5 | +0.815 |
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 would like to speak about breast cancer screening and symptomatic breast cancer services for younger women. There is a rise in younger women being diagnosed with breast cancer and we need to move with the times when dealing with this. Last week, on 4 Februar…
I thank the Minister of State. I now see where the problem lies. I want to put on the record that I have huge issues with the DMURS. They would be better placed, instead of narrowing roads and junctions and making them totally uncomfortable for people to drive…
Today I will tell the House about a recently launched campaign called BreastCancerKnowMore. It is a survivor-led national breast cancer awareness campaign from Breast Cancer Ireland. Members may have seen the posters and billboards with very powerful images of…
I share the Minister of State's concerns in respect this matter. As the previous speaker mentioned, we have all read stories. I have heard conversations when a story hits the headlines about someone being hurt. People ask why nothing was done and say that some…
I raise a matter of urgent public health concern, which is the continued use and abuse of sunbeds in Ireland. Last week, the Institute of Public Health published a troubling report that provided an overview of sunbed use in Ireland and policy options to reduce…
I thank the Minister of State. If it is receiving funding, its methodology needs to be reviewed and scrutinised. This is the comprehensive litter management plan South Dublin County Council has implemented. I really have no concerns about the standard of work …
I thank the Minister for taking this. I want to raise the growing issue of the lack of car parking spaces in newly built apartment developments, particularly in areas like Tallaght and Citywest. I am not the first to raise this in recent times and I will not b…
I will speak about concerning wait times for dental health appointments for children. It was discussed quite a bit yesterday in the other House. Kids' dental health is very important, keeping our children mindful of good oral hygiene and, equally, any work tha…
Before we start, I welcome the representatives of the Union of Students in Ireland, the National Women's Council, Rape Crisis Ireland and the Irish Council for International Students.…
I have spoken to the children, who have a lived experience and are saying they need more reading schools. I am not happy with the answer, if I am being honest. This is about two years of children's lives and getting them on the right road so that things can be…
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.