Why Ireland, Steve Bannon?
Former Trump adviser, etc. Steve Bannon being sentenced to jail. June 6, 2024
WHY STEVE BANNON HAS AN EYE ON IRELAND
The once-powerful Trump lieutenant Steve Bannon thinks there’s one nation besides America that’s ready to be great again.
“I’m spending a ton of time behind the scenes on the Irish situation to help form an Irish national party,” he told Politico the week after Christmas. “They’re going to have an Irish MAGA, and we’re going to have an Irish Trump. That’s all going to come together, no doubt.”
Why Ireland? In November, its voters elected a presidential candidate from the left. Candidates from the far right didn’t make it onto the ballot, including MMA fighter Conor McGregor, who was endorsed by Trump. In the 2025 elections for the Dail (Parliament in Irish) not one candidate from the right wing National Party got elected. While there is surely some support for Trumpism in Ireland, a MIGA movement is still a pipe dream.
Bannon, great great-grandson of an Irish Famine emigrant, was saying the same thing about Ireland's potential three years ago when he called the country a “powder keg.”
“That country is right on the edge thanks to mass migration,” he said as 2025 trailed out.
Diane Clohesy, 1990 Rose of Tralee contestant from Pery's Nightclub in Linerick
HE MARRIED A ROSE OF TRALEE CONTESTANT
Bannon’s ties to Ireland go deeper than his great great -grandfather Lawrence Bannon. He admits, "I came from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats.” Sounds pretty Irish-American to me.
Bannon’s real Irish connection is that his third wife was a Rose of Tralee contestant. To some that may not seem like a big deal. They’re obviously not tuned in to Irish culture. Since 1959 the Rose of Tralee Pageant in County Kerry has been a defining event for modern Ireland; its own Miss America pageant, open to women of Ireland and daughters of the Irish Diaspora.
Diane Clohesy from Limerick was a contestant in 1990. She didn’t win. (The Rose from Germany did.) She left Limerick for New York looking for work in the fashion industry. She did some modelling. Eventually, she met Bannon, who was working on Wall Street and producing movies. The two worked closely together.
Twelve years after the Rose of Tralee pageant, Clohesy was back in the news in Ireland. But it wasn’t good news. RTE reported that on a flight from Kennedy Airport to Shannon Airport she assaulted an Aer Lingus flight attendant who wouldn’t let her have another drink. She ended up paying more than $1,000 in fines and was banned from Aer Lingus for life.
That incident would be the least of her legal worries. With Bannon as he started up Breitbart.com, she moved to Los Angeles and then to South Florida. They divorced in 2009, but up until Bannon became Trump’s senior counsellor and chief strategist in his first term, he paid the $5500 a month rent on her place in Mami and was seen there regularly. So were Pedro Garcia Jr, Jose Cavana and Victor Ramirez among other Floridians.
In 2014 Clohesy was caught trying to smuggle a cell phone, crystal meth and the drug molly to Ramirez in the Miami Dade Jail. Charges were eventually dropped against her and the corrections officer she was working with.
All this was reported back in early 2017 when Bannon was flexing his muscles as Trump’s right-hand man (kind of like Elon Musk at the outset of the current term). But not extensively. When the mainstream media reported that Bannon was registered to vote in Florida and New York, he had this to say, "The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut."
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIANE CLOHESY?
Initial efforts to track Diane Clohesy down on the internet were unsuccessful. Her last reported contact with Bannon was in 2016 when he shut off the water service at the home in Coconut Grove, Florida he’d been renting. She MAY be currently living in Vallejo Viejo, Argentina.
Bannon, meanwhile, seems obsessed with Ireland and its potential for a white nationalist political upheaval.
About her modelling career, one Limerick local who knew Diane Clohesy said, "She probably didn’t have the height to make it as a big time model."