Alex Maskey

Alex Maskey ( born January 28, 1952 in Belfast, Northern Ireland ) is a Northern Irish politician of the party Sinn Féin.

Youth

Maskey comes from a Catholic working-class family and was first employment in the docks of Belfast and later as a barman. After that, he was an amateur boxer for several years. With the start of the Troubles to 1969, he joined the republican movement and was imprisoned twice by British security forces.

Political action

Maskey is one of the leading representatives of the political strategy of Gerry Adams. In 1983 he was elected as the first member of Sinn Féin in the Belfast City Council. As representatives of the IRA -affiliated party, he became the target of loyalist assassin. An assassination attempt in 1987, perpetrated by the Ulster Defence Association, he barely survived.

In the local elections of 2002 Sinn Féin gained the most votes and Maskey became the Lord Mayor of Belfast appointed. He was the first Republican mayor of the city. As a gesture of reconciliation, he put on a memorial for Protestant soldiers of the British Army, who had fallen in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, a wreath. The reservations of many Unionist Member of Parliament he could not disperse so nevertheless.

In 2003 he moved as MP for the constituency of South Belfast in the Northern Ireland National Assembly. It acts as a spokesman for his party in police matters and is a member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, a cross- party committee, which oversees the work of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Maskey also appeared internationally as a representative of the peace process in Northern Ireland in appearance. In 2006, he mediated in the negotiations between the Spanish government and the Basque separatist movement ETA, which led to a ceasefire ( ultimately only short ).