BELFAST CITY’S FIRST-EVER SINN FÉIN COUNCILLOR STEPS DOWN AFTER 27 YEARS

Alex Maskey: First among equals

AS ALEX MASKEY steps down as a councillor after 27 years to focus on his role as an MLA for South Belfast, CAITLÍN NÍ RUNAIDH interviews him about his time on Belfast City Council and his plans for the future.

I MET the unassuming man himself in the glamourous setting of the South Belfast Sinn Féin Office.
On a cold and dreary Sunday afternoon, Alex Maskey allowed me to share a trip down Memory Lane. His three decades spent on the council can only be described as a labyrinth of historical and political happening.
From internment to not knowing where to hang his coat on his first day at the council, to numerous attempts on his life, to his time spent as Belfast’s first Sinn Féin Lord Mayor, this man has seen it all.
Alex Maskey has been a part of the “political furniture”, as he himself puts it, from the very beginning of Sinn Féin’s transition into electoral politics. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of his parents we might never have been so familiar with the name Maskey.
Papers signed and pennies saved, the young boxer from the New Lodge Road had his heart set on leaving for Australia in the 1960s but it wasn’t to be and ever since then he has never looked back.
“I’ve never regretted my decision to stay in Belfast. I don’t think I could have ever had settled had I left Ireland. The pogroms of 1969 cemented this decision for me. It wasn’t a matter of discussion for me anymore it became a question of what I was going to do about it.”
At the beginning of the 1980s, Sinn Féin took the leap into the political main, spurred by the success of the H-Blocks election campaign. It was a leap of faith as never before had a generation of republicans attempted to undertake a long-term political strategy.
Maskey remembers this time as an exciting one.
“I was on the outskirts of Monaghan driving home from Galway when I saw a cascade of cars coming towards me, with flags waving, horns tooting in celebration –  I knew instantly that Bobby Sands had been elected.
“I said to myself ‘I should be there.’
“It was like a light switch going off in my mind. The events that took place after this, his subsequent and tragic death, underlined to me that gaining electoral strength was not enough on its own. It was what you did with that electoral strength that mattered; it was about gaining political strength which is a completely different animal altogether.”
In 1983, a by-election win for Alex marked the beginning of Sinn Féin’s formal relationship with the Belfast City Council. It would be Maskey that would spearhead this campaign. His remit from the party was to basically lay the markers for the next council election which was to be in 1985; who would have guessed at that time that he wouldn’t leave the council until 27 years later?
His first task on entering the council was to simply find out where to hang his coat and also to find an opportunity to speak, which he did. He remembers the sheer shock on some unionists’ faces when he spoke that day in the chamber. Although it has been highly publicised that Maskey would be entering the council; some still could not believe that it was a reality.
Maskey got to work. His main goal was to break down the unmoving stone walls of City Hall and that’s exactly what he did.
“I immediately joined the Community Services Committee. It had one of the smallest budgets in the council but I didn’t care; this was heaven for a member of a grassroots party like myself.
“We started to invite residents’ groups, young mothers’ groups with their prams in tow, and other community groups from every side ‘of the divide’, not only to apply for funding but to visit the chambers themselves.
“I will never forget the horrified look of some of the councillors at seeing this. I suppose ‘our likes’ had not been a common sight in the grand buildings of City Hall.
“A famous quote from the time (I believe it was Sammy Wilson) who said that ‘the council has become a place for people and their begging bowls’. It’s a fact that I am very proud of. To me this signalled people empowerment.”
2002 was an epic year for republicans in Belfast with Alex Maskey being appointed as the first ever Sinn Féin Mayor. It caused uproar within unionism at the time; they even refused to supply Maskey with a unionist deputy Lord Mayor.
“Hanging the Tricolour in the Mayor’s Chambers did not help matters, I suppose!”
Three weeks after Alex was awarded the job as mayor, he faced one of his toughest challenges yet: Memorial Day. “I sat down and spoke with Gerry Adams and Mitchel McLaughlin to discuss how I should approach the event. I told them that I felt I had to mark this ceremony is some credible way.”
He told them:
“I can spend this year as a republican on a white charger but you can bet that I won’t make one blind bit of an impact on the broader community if I do so – I’m not prepared to do that.”
Alex went on to lay a laurel wreath to commemorate all of the Irish men who died in world wars, a gesture that has broken boundaries in relations to the reconciliation of our divided community in the North.
And what now for Alex Maskey?
“My commitment lies with my South Belfast constituency.
“South Belfast is a changing part of the city. Although this part of the city is known as pretty affluent, it does have a lot of disadvantaged areas also. With some strong political leadership I think we could target our resources and help ease some of the problems within this community.
This man’s career has been anything but dull to say the least. Two hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon was not nearly enough time to spend with a man so fascinating as himself. During the course of the interview I asked Alex where he got the strength and utter determination from. To my delight he replied:
“Well, I didn’t lick it off the stones anyway!”
You can take the man out of the New Lodge and bring him to City Hall but you can’t take the New Lodge out of the man.