Ted Howell, aka Eamon McCrory, who died yesterday after being ill for some time, was the most important republican figure in the peace process you’ve never heard of.
He was one of Gerry Adams’s closest confidants and advisers for more than 50 years.
A couple of years ahead of Adams at St Mary’s CBS on the Glen Road in west Belfast, Howell joined the IRA soon after it was established and became O/C of the Belfast Brigade’s second battalion in the west of the city.
However, by the late seventies he had moved behind the scenes and spent many years in north America and mainland Europe, attempting to buy weaponry, ferrying cash back to Ireland, liaising with supporters and developing networks.
For much of that time he used the name Eamon McCrory, though he had a variety of noms de guerre and passports to go with them. In effect he ran Sinn Féin’s foreign affairs.
He was arrested in the US at Buffalo in 1982 on a mission to buy arms and deported.
The following year he was arrested in Dublin after Sinn Féin treasurer and former IRA man Joe Cahill was observed handing him a bag found to contain $80,000.
He was acquitted on IRA membership charges and after that went behind the scenes concentrating on developing Sinn Féin’s electoral policies and political project.
One prominent republican, who knew Howell well, said “he had a rare shrewd brain, panoramic and microscopic”.
Howell became the most prominent figure in Gerry Adams’s ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ or think tank.
Adams took pleasure in playing on Howell’s lack of public profile. In his 1988 book ‘Pathway to Peace’, he wrote: “This essay could not have been written without the co-operation and encouragement of the ‘Kitchen Cabinet’. I thank them. Thanks also to Eamon ‘Ted’ McCrory for access to (his) material.”
The 2018 book ‘The Negotiators’ Cookbook’, Adams said, was “written by Gerry Adams with a little help from Ted Howell and Padraic Wilson. Without it there may have been no peace in Ireland.”
Howell was a crucial figure in the Good Friday Agreement negotiations.
When Adams started using Twitter in 2013, he enjoyed confusing the media with references to ‘Ted’ and how close he was to Ted. Some outlets thought Adams was losing it when he posted pictures of a teddy bear. Few realised his ‘Ted’ was Howell.
During the long, torturous peace process from the early nineties, with exchanges of documents between the British and Sinn Féin, Howell was at the heart of analysing the documents, writing party responses including speeches by Adams.
His continuing critical role briefly came into public view during the inquiry into the Renewable Heat scandal in 2018 when emails emerged from the then Minister of Finance, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, asking if Howell would be ‘content’ for him to sign off a cost-cutting plan presented by civil servants.
That we are where we are today is in no small measure thanks to Ted Howell’s intellect, influence and resolute commitment to the republican movement’s peace project.