Former IRA member who once tried to kill Bobby Tohill now helps him on his deathbed

The Eucharist minister was at Bobby Tohill’s bedside last week to give him Communion, bringing him the comfort that only a lifelong friendship can provide.

“We are friends no matter what,” Tolan told us. “We have a story: when I got here, he had no bowls, no knives, no forks, no clothes, no bedding.

“One hundred percent of people will see this as an unlikely alliance, but I will be with Bobby until the end.”

Twenty years ago, Tolan was a changed man, part of the IRA team that snatched Tohill from Kelly’s Cellars pub in February 2004 and put him in the back of a van with the intention of driving him to his death.

He was there when Tohill was beaten, he was there when his captors told their prisoners that they were going to torture and execute him.

And here he was on Friday, sitting by his friend’s bed, as a minister of the Eucharist giving him Communion.

Tohill had predicted that the IRA would interrogate him and take him to the border to dump him dead on the roadside or bury him in a shallow grave.

Only the dramatic intervention of the PSNI saved his life. Tolan went to prison for his involvement in the plot to kill his friend and now, under completely different circumstances, he will be here when the lights go out for Tohill.

“How did I find out about Bobby’s fight? Today, as a devout Catholic, when I see one of my friends sick I have to help,” he said.

“Yes, people may think it’s strange that I spent six and a half years behind bars for Bobby’s kidnapping, but we were always friends, we’ve known each other since childhood, but what happened between Bobby and I was one of those. things.

“He was always my friend.”

Men see no contradiction in what they have been through. They were different times in 2004, both men had dedicated their entire lives to the Republican cause, both did things that in any other circumstance they would not consider, like killing a friend.

“People will find it difficult to understand why I would stand by Bobby – things happened, things had to be done and even when I was in prison, Bobby wrote me letters.

“There were never hard feelings; It was a case of we had to do what we had to do.

“From a human point of view, I knew Bobby was in trouble; He had no gasoline, no medicine, no food, he had no clothes and I arrived next to him.

“What happened between Bobby and I was the dark side of life, but we have moved on, it was what it was, right now it is what it is. Regardless of our past, we were always friends no matter what. “I would have always helped Bobby.”

They were talking to him World Sunday in the bedroom of Tohill’s house. An hour earlier, a skeletal Bobby Tohill loomed from the door of his run-down bungalow in west Belfast: a ghost of the man who once struck fear in the hearts of his enemies.

“Go ahead, love,” he said as he led us into the corners of his home in Turf Lodge.

This run-down location is where former IRA hitman Tohill will breathe his last. A hero to his IRA comrades, he will die in poverty.

It is not an executioner’s bullet that will take his life, but the progressive liver disease that has condemned him to death. There is no turning back for Tohill.

His eyes still burn brightly and his mind is alert, but the shrunken, unshaven cheeks and disease-ravaged body tell the story.

A framed photograph of hunger striker Bobby Sands watches from the wall as he waits for photographs.

Decay surrounds it everywhere, it is as if the shadow of death has been cast over the place. He depends on the charity of neighbors and family to feed him. He gets into bed under the duvet cover that Tommy’s mother gave him.

To receive Communion he had to go to confession. She has done so and says he is at peace with his past; a past that will be taken to the grave.

Smiling at his friend last Friday, he said: “I don’t have any hard feelings, you asked me if I made an agreement with you, supposedly, to take me away, I did it a long time ago.”

Comrades to the end, Tolan said that despite rumors, Tohill has never been ostracized by his community.

“He is a legend, he deserves respect,” he said.