Published Tuesday, 15 September 2009
The Sinn Fein MLA told the Assembly and Executive Review Committee members must concentrate on the transfer of powers before taking on new and potentially heavy workloads.
"We have spent the last 31 meetings on policing and justice which indicates a substantial amount of work has already been done on that."
"We need to finish the work we already have before we take more on," said the South Belfast MLA.
Despite Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness hoping for a Christmas deadline, unionists' preference to wait until funding and community support has been established could cause further delays.
On Monday, politicians in Westminster yesterday the first stage of legislation to allow Northern Ireland to have its own Department of Justice, moving closer to devolving powers to Stormont.
'Frustation'
But in Tuesday's meeting, the UUP's Alan McFarland and SDLP's Carmel Hanna alleged political stalemate had been present at previous meetings.
Mrs Hanna said the committee's inability to make decisions was frustrating.
"Decisions are not being made. There is a lot of gameplay going on," she said.
The DUP's Nigel Dodds asked Mr Maskey to clarify if he meant any issues left on the agenda for 2009 would then be discussed in 2010.
The SDLP's Alex Attwood said in light of First Minister Peter Robinson's comments last week it was hypocritical for the DUP to want to discuss an issue such as voting patterns now which are scheduled to be raised in the future.
Mr Robinson sparked controversy when he called for an urgent reform of how the Assembly makes its decisions including weakening the current veto system, to which Mr McGuinness replied that the First Minister must have suffered sunstroke and spent "too much time at Disneyland" while on a recent holiday to Florida.
Mr Maskey added: "I believe if we put our minds to it, we can resolve these issues."
John O'Dowd of Sinn Fein said it was also important to be able to show the public "quality not quantity".