Tom Clonan
former Irish Army office and academic
Thomas Martin Clonan (born 1965/1966) is an Irish senator, security analyst, author and retired Irish Army Captain. He was elected to Seanad Éireann at the 2022 Dublin University by-election. He was re-elected at the 2025 Seanad election.
Military career
Clonan grew up in Finglas, Dublin and attended St Kevin's College, Dublin school in Ballygall. He completed a Bachelor in Education degree at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 1987, before joining the Irish Army as a cadet in 1989.
In 1995, Clonan deployed to South Lebanon as an officer commanding Irish troops under the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) mission in that country. Clonan's deployment to Lebanon coincided with the Israeli Operation Grapes of Wrath against Hezbollah which culminated in the massacre of refugees at the village of Qana in April 1996. Clonan has spoken about his experiences of conflict and trauma in the RTÉ documentary Peacekeepers (2016) and in his first book Blood, Sweat and Tears. He was also an OSCE election monitor in Bosnia during the Dayton Agreement in 1996. In this role, Clonan was based in the Serb-held town of Prijedor.
The public source identifies “Tom Clonan” as former Irish Army office and academic. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Clonan, former and Irish.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24572450. VIAF identifies the subject as 297482471. The Library of Congress control number is n2013016201. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 1966, 2022 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Clonan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.