 Maskey resigned his seat on 14 September 2009.Maskey was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in the 2007 elections as part of a Sinn Féin team which won five out of the six seats in Belfast West.After a Public Accounts Committee report criticised the waste of money on a project to build a campus of the University of Ulster on one of the peace lines at Springvale in north Belfast, Maskey placed the blame on the SDLP Minister Carmel Hanna.