Tobin, Liam (1895–1963), republican, soldier, businessman, and civil servant, was born 15 November 1895 at 13 North Great George's St., Cork, son of David Tobin of Clolefin (Cloughleafin, near Mitchelstown, north Co. Cork), furniture salesman at Clery's department store, Dublin, and Mary Agnes Tobin (née Butler) of Upperchurch, Co. Tipperary. He had one brother, Nicholas (later an army captain, killed in 1922), and one sister, Catherine. Educated at CBS Kilkenny, he moved to Dublin in 1912, becoming a clerk in the hardware department of Brooks Thomas Ltd, Sackville Place. He joined the Irish Volunteers (C Company, 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade) and the IRB after the Howth gun-running of July 1914, serving in the Four Courts garrison in the Easter rising of April 1916 under Commandant Edward (‘Ned’) Daly (qv). After the surrender he witnessed the humiliation of Daly and elder rebel leader Thomas Clarke (qv), identifying a Capt. Percival Lea-Wilson, on whom he swore revenge. Tobin's death sentence was commuted to ten years' penal servitude.
After Portland, Lewes (with Michael Collins (qv)), and Broadmoor prisons, he was released on amnesty from Pentonville 15 June 1917. He became Dublin Brigade intelligence officer, and collaborated with Collins in the National Aid Association. On 5 January 1918 he became a founding member of the New Ireland Assurance Company, initiated at Frongoch camp in Wales by Collins, M. W. O'Reilly, and prominent IRB veterans of the rising such as Denis McCullough (qv), Frank Thornton (qv), and Michael Staines (qv). Tobin was its inspector for Munster, working legitimately from 24 Grand Parade, Cork. Throughout the war of independence (1919–21) and the Anglo–Irish treaty negotiations in London, he, Thornton, and Tom Cullen (qv) of Wicklow were a semi-autonomous triumvirate of GHQ intelligence officers directly responsible to Collins. Using Dublin city centre safe houses, including Vaughan's Hotel in Parnell Square and intelligence headquarters at 3 Crow St., they worked almost in the shadow of Dublin castle, guarding Collins and grimly directing his ‘squad’ of assassins, most chillingly in the revenge killing (15 June 1920) of Lea-Wilson, then an RIC district inspector in Co. Wexford, and the coordinated shooting dead of fourteen British officers in Dublin on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 21 November 1920.
Tobin engaged so thoroughly with Collins's political aspirations that his loyalty was assured when the Anglo–Irish treaty (6 December 1921) ended formal hostilities. Each believed that twenty-six-county dominion status and military sovereignty afforded the prospect of a thirty-two-county republic in the medium term. Tobin had left New Ireland Assurance in 1921 to be Collins's full-time deputy director of intelligence. In the pro-treaty IRA's transition from guerrilla to regular military status early in 1922, Tobin, Thornton, and Cullen became acting major-generals of the National Army. Tobin's brief but unproductive assignment to create a post-treaty police detective unit ended when civil war erupted in June 1922. Although he informed defence minister Richard Mulcahy (qv) of ‘our lads’ assassinating Field-marshal Sir Henry Wilson (qv) in London (22 June), no evidence linked Tobin directly with any orders there may have been to kill Wilson. He accompanied Maj.-gen. Emmet Dalton (qv) as intelligence officer in the seaborne landing at Passage West (8 August) that captured Cork from republican forces. Although in the Cork command area, he was not at Béal na mBláth when Collins was killed (22 August). Collins's death undoubtedly hardened his resolve for a republic, however remote its prospects began to appear.
In October–December 1922 Tobin was briefly director of intelligence and ex-officio member of the army council, but from January 1923 became ADC to the governor general, T. M. Healy (qv). Increasingly isolated as the government appeared to settle for what had been agreed in the 1921 treaty, he viewed peacetime demobilisation of long-serving officers in 1923–4 with alarm. IRA veterans seemed less valued than ex-British army advisers commissioned in the much reduced National (now Free State) Army. Early in 1923 Tobin, Col. Charles Dalton (brother of Emmet Dalton), and a host of Collins loyalists had formed the Irish Republican Army Organisation (IRAO), an ‘old comrades’ association claiming that a hostile IRB clique ruled the army council and had abandoned the republicanism of Michael Collins.
Notwithstanding the sympathy of Joseph McGrath (qv), minister for industry and commerce, Tobin failed to persuade the government either to reverse this trend or to cease demobilisation. On 6 March 1924 he issued a signed ultimatum demanding removal of the army council and an end to demobilisation, signalling an army crisis which the authorities interpreted as mutiny. His defiance (reasserted in an IRAO pamphlet The truth about the army crisis) triggered a swift government response: the appointment of Gen. Eoin O'Duffy (qv) inspector-general of the army and the replacement of the army council with a new general staff in order to remove the IRB issue from the equation. Tobin's leading supporters were arrested (19 March) at Devlin's public house, 68 Parnell St., Dublin and dismissed rather than court-martialled. He resigned his commission on 21 March. Joseph McGrath had resigned his ministry, indignant at a raid on his home, while Richard Mulcahy resigned his portfolio, believing himself undermined by the appointment of O'Duffy.
As a civilian, Tobin sought a political ‘third way’, anticipating the constitutional republicanism of Fianna Fáil (1926), while running the Gresham Motor Hire Service (1924–31), located behind Dublin's Gresham Hotel. In 1929 he formed a short-lived political party, Clann na nGaedheal, with Frank Thornton among others, aimed at healing civil war divisions. He joined the Irish Hospitals Trust at Earlsfort Terrace, created by Joseph McGrath in 1930 to raise hospital funds through an Irish sweepstake, representing it in the USA until his resignation in 1939. He was superintendent of the oireachtas at Leinster House between November 1940 and his retirement in December 1959. In this post he continued his efforts at reconciliation by organising religious retreats to Milltown in the Dublin suburbs. On 14 October 1930 he married Mona, daughter of Patrick Higgins of Carrick-on-Shannon and Mary Higgins (née Nicholson) of Keadue, Co. Roscommon. They had two daughters, Máire (who married Desmond Hand) and Anne (who married Frank Thornton's son, Pádraig). Liam Tobin died 30 April 1963 at his home, Clolefin, Mount Merrion Avenue, Blackrock, Co. Dublin. Accorded full military honours, he was buried in Glasnevin cemetery.