A joiner by trade, JJ Magee has been a Sinn Féin Belfast City councillor for a decade. Representing the nationalist Oldpark area in the north of the city, the 61 year-old is a long-standing member of the party.
He sits on the North Belfast District Policing and Community Safety Partnership and is also deputy chairman of the Standards and Business Committee on the local authority.
Mr Magee’s media profile has been raised in recent years through his cross-community work to ease sectarian tensions at interface areas, particularly during summer months and at contentious July 12th bonfire sites.
His name featured in a Stormont expenses controversy a decade ago when it emerged he was paid thousands of pounds in public funds to decorate the office of his brother’s partner and the then culture minister, Carál Ní Chuilín.
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Ms Ní Chuilín, who is the long-term partner of Gerard Magee (a former Sinn Féin press officer), failed to declare the relationship on the Assembly’s Register of Interests, a failing which Sinn Féin attributed to an “administrative oversight”.
Six other Sinn Féin elected representatives used a firm owned by JJ Magee to decorate their constituency offices at the time, with the overall bill totalling more than £65,000.
Mr Magee is also a member of the campaign group, Relatives for Justice, which supports Troubles’ victims.
He lost his teenage sister, Anne, in 1976 when she was shot by loyalist paramilitaries while working in a corner shop close to the family home off the Cliftonville Road in north Belfast. She died 17 days after the attack.
In an interview in 2010, he spoke of the impact of working with victims’ groups in the decades after his sister’s murder and how he had come to “hate sectarianism”.
“As the years went on, particularly when I started working with Protestants, I realised they were the same as me in a lot of ways. My whole attitude changed,” he said.
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