![Ted Howell: 'He was soft-spoken but we noticed early on that whenever [he] intervened, the rest of the Sinn Féin delegation listened intently.' Photograph: O'Neill's Funeral Directors Belfast/Facebook](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/3C74OKBUXRECXDXYYS3JKYO2JU.jpg?auth=20b7b25ed2c12b0237495eef7a8ee7889241e711d49c086dc14c3032f1bea9ef&smart=true&width=1024&height=1364)
Born: May 20th, 1947
Died: January 3rd, 2025
Ted Howell, who has died aged 77, was the most self-effacing, yet one of the most influential IRA and Sinn Féin figures, who incongruously also appeared regularly on social media, along with rubber ducks and cupcakes, as Gerry Adams’s “teddy bear”.
Howell’s association with the former Sinn Féin president went back more than 50 years to when they were both interned in the early 1970s and continued through three decades of the Troubles and into the period of the peace process and beyond.
He also served as Sinn Féin director of foreign affairs and was a go-between on behalf of the IRA leadership with senior Irish-Americans in the early days of the peace process in the 1990s.
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In 1982 he was arrested for entering the United States from Canada during a plot to smuggle arms for the IRA to Ireland. He also had a run-in with gardaí over a plastic bag containing $80,000.
Historian and Irish News political commentator Brian Feeney described him as the “most important republican figure in the peace process you’ve never heard of” while former senior Irish diplomat Ray Bassett said Irish politicians and officials “were never in doubt about his importance and influence within the republican movement”. Ed Moloney, who wrote A Secret History of the IRA, said he was “arguably one of the most influential figures in the Provisionals”.
From west Belfast, Howell was born in 1947. He joined the Provisional IRA early in the Troubles and was interned twice in the 1970s, on the Maidstone prison ship and in Long Kesh. Gerry Adams recalled that on the night of Howell’s marriage to Eileen Duffy in October 1972, the groom was arrested, but that the false identification Howell was carrying “held up” and he was released the following morning. Over the years he assumed a number of such false identities.
Duffy, who died in June 2004, also was a prominent republican, who for many years was director of the Falls Community Council in west Belfast.
Howell’s 31-year-old brother, James, a car dealer, and business partner Gerald McCrea, were abducted and murdered by loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Defence Association in July 1972.
If he mostly escaped the attention of the public, it was a different story with the authorities. Howell and four other men were arrested near Niagara Falls in 1982 as they attempted to enter the US from Canada carrying thousands of dollars, sterling and Irish punts – with the intention, it was alleged, on procuring arms and ammunition for the IRA.
He was deported from Canada but escaped from Canadian immigration officials at Orly Airport in Paris. He was subsequently apprehended by gardaí after Joe Cahill, the late IRA chief of staff, handed him a bag containing $80,000 dollars in a restaurant on O’Connell Street in Dublin. He was stopped on O’Connell Bridge but ran off with a white plastic bag which, after he was chased and arrested, was found to contain the money. He claimed the cash was for election expenses.
Howell was charged with membership of the IRA but was acquitted. The Special Criminal Court in Dublin refused to release the money back to Cahill but eventually, after further legal proceedings, it was returned with interest.
Despite Howell’s IRA involvement and his arrests, he remained a secretive but important republican player. He was rarely photographed but was an authoritative presence whose word carried serious weight in the highest echelons of the Provisional republican movement. The most senior Irish and British diplomats also knew of his standing and paid close attention when he made his contributions during the critical and fraught period leading up to the Belfast Agreement of 1998.
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Just once the mask slipped a little and he emerged briefly from the wings of Sinn Féin in an incident that reinforced how pivotal a Sinn Féin back-room heavyweight he was. That was during the “cash for ash” scandal which in 2017 crashed the Northern Executive for three years.
The late deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, pulled Sinn Féin out of the executive over former DUP first minister Arlene Foster’s refusal to stand aside pending an investigation into the flawed renewable heat incentive (RHI) scheme. Under the scheme, for every £1 that users spent on their green heating systems they got back £1.60 in subsidies – hence “cash for ash” or “the more you burn the more you earn”.
It was discovered that former Sinn Féin MLA Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, who was finance minister for a period during the RHI crisis, had sought the approval of Howell before he would agree to sign off on a plan aimed at cutting some of the cost of the scheme. This was despite the fact that three senior civil servants had told him the cost-saving plan was legitimate. Howell gave his approval and the scheme then went ahead.
This triggered renewed claims that Sinn Féin in the North and the South was run by “shadowy”, “unelected”, “IRA army council-type” personnel.
Ray Bassett, a former Irish ambassador to Canada and a senior Department of Foreign Affairs official during the peace process, noted how in the negotiations leading to the 1998 Belfast Agreement, “Gerry Adams would almost invariably have a word with the quiet man in the delegation, Ted Howell, whenever we reached a critical juncture”.
“He was soft-spoken but we noticed early on that whenever Ted Howell intervened, the rest of the Sinn Féin delegation listened intently, as we did ourselves,” Bassett wrote in an article on writer and broadcaster Jude Collins’s blog. “He had a great ability to absorb detail and left his imprint on all Sinn Féin’s key policy documents.”
Adams, in a number of tributes, also acknowledged how Howell was a key, yet reserved strategist. “Think of any of the major republican political, organisational shifts or initiatives taken over recent decades. Ted was at the heart of all of them,” he wrote in the Andersonstown News.
“And then there was the public process of negotiations with the two governments and the USA. In all of this Ted was indispensable.”
Adams and Howell were very close. Some of Howell’s recipes for dishes that he put together during the peace process negotiations appeared in Adams’s The Negotiator’s Cookbook. On his tweets and his blogs, Adams regularly referred to his “teddy bear” with ducks and cupcakes also featuring in these whimsical posts. Queried by one interviewer about them, Adams gnomically replied, “you have to think of the sensitivities of teddy bears. Teddy bears aren’t given their place in the scheme of things in this world.”
There was little doubt, however, that these dispatches referred to his right-hand man who had a significant if inconspicuous place in the republican world.
Ted Howell is survived by his sons, Eamonn and Proinnsias, their wives, Nora and Karen, and grandchildren, Micéal, Caoimhe and Amelia.