Raw text from parliamentary proceedings is obtained through the Oireachtas Open Data API© Houses of the Oireachtas and reused under the Oireachtas (Open Data) PSI Licence, which incorporates the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. All statistics generated on this website are independent estimates and do not represent official Oireachtas interpretations. Official records are available at oireachtas.ie
This website uses the Lingua Language-Detector library to estimate the proportion of Irish and English within parliamentary text. However this tool, alongside all other language detection tools, has limitations when working with mixed‑language inputs. Very short passages often produce inconsistent results as the model lacks sufficient context. Named entities, such as Irish surnames or placenames, can also mislead the detector, and common loanwords may cause misclassification. Please keep these limitations in mind before berating your local Teachta Dála for not speaking enough of their native tongue.
Sentiment scores on this website are generated using VADER(Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner), a lexicon and rule‑based sentiment analysis tool. VADER calculates four sentiment scores: Negative (Neg), Neutral (Neu), Positive (Pos), and Compound. The Compound score is a weighted composite that ranges from −1 (most negative) to +1 (most positive). It is computed by summing the valence scores of each word in the lexicon, adjusting for heuristics, and normalizing the result. Sentiment classification is then determined by the Compound score: a score ≥ 0.05 is classified as positive, ≤ −0.05 as negative, and between −0.05 and 0.05 as neutral. VADER is not without it's limitations. It is tuned primarily for social‑media language, which means it can at times misinterpret sentiment in a parliamentary context. Future versions of this website will incorporate a sentiment‑analysis method better suited to the linguistic patterns of Dáil Éireann.