IMHO what we need in NI are directly elected, locally accountable Mayors per the French model. I'm talking mini Mayors of Donaghadee or Ballymaccarret - people with authority to change the local infrastructure. Someone to point the finger at when there isn't enough car parking behind the Newtownards Rd or to ask why there's still a gaping hole on Bangor's Queen's Parade after all these years. They should be answerable to residents and local traders associations.

Our current local government seems too big / distant to deal with / be accountable for the everyday and too small to oversee our major public services (schools, hospitals, policing etc).

Personally if we had decent county sized local government (also with a directly elected Lord Mayor, prefect, what you will, and local reponsive mairies I'm not sure I care about the NI assembly. Our politicians are rubbish at bringing in external investment anyway. Who'd send Paisley or Adams to meet the potential internatonal investor off the plane? We could outsource that to Bertie and the IDA.

How do they know when the Assembly hardly had any time to do any constructive for businesses, being brought down by the Unionists 4 times? Anyway, Northern Nationalists have the right to a proper say in the running of that place. So do Unionists for that matter.

many businesses do not see local politicians as being adequately supportive of local businesses

Correct.

But then, that's partly because too few businesspeople get involved in politics.

Business (and indeed general economic) policy is fundamentally flawed in NI. You have investment bodies supporting only specific industries (basically boosting call centres while allowing manufacturing to go down the drain), a Department of Enterprise which cannot understand innovation of anything other than product, and the NIO which basically gets in the way of indigenous businesses by handing contracts to big-name outsiders regardless of real ability.

It's nonsense - but it'll stay that way if businessfolk keep taking a 'holier than thou' attitude to politics. The logical follow-on of 'Don't vote, can't complain' is 'Don't stand, can't really complain'.

We've had direct rule so long that the only way for business to meaningfully engage with politics has been through bodies such as the IOD or CoC interfacing with the NIO. The local alternative is to get involved with local development partnerships and traders associations. Local business people do this.

Reputation's everything in local business and it's hard to stand on a business first / leave constitutional politics for the MLA's ticket.

The biggest danger is that we have institutions so powerless that they can only offer variations on the theme of new labour economics to the frustration of voters who don't agree with it. I think we need to have full devolution of economic and fiscal policy.

First we have to prove that we can handle the powers we will have. Then build a consensus for the kind of radical devolution that we really need.