The feeling one has after reading Matt Cooper's account of those responsible for the boom and bust of the past 20 years is of wanting to emigrate as fast as possible. Why? Because, as he points out near the end of the book, the same geniuses are still in charge, more or less.

Cooper's portrayal of the ruling elite is a story of greed, hubris and incompetence. One is reminded of African states in the 1960s emerging from years of colonialism and then being fleeced by their own. We got our freedom a few decades earlier and we've come on quite a bit more, but are we so different?

Cooper's picture of the people with the power in Ireland is shocking, hilarious, but ultimately depressing. It's one of jumped-up businessmen, conniving politicians, ineffectual regulators and civil servants. His account is a tale of plasterers and surveyors who morphed into developers with delusions of grandeur. It's an exploration of the murky nexus between politics and business and the way those at the top played fast and loose with planning, political rules and "donations".

There's not much new, but as an overview of what went on this is by far the most readable of the various books on the subject now on the shelves. That's not surprising, given that Cooper has been one of the country's leading journalists over the period, as Business Editor of the Irish Independent and Editor of the Sunday Tribune before his present role as anchor of The Last Word on Today FM.

Given Cooper's background, it's perhaps also not surprising that Tony O'Reilly figures prominently -- maybe too prominently in a book that presumably aims to give proportional exposure to all the big players. Cooper spends a lot of time analysing O'Reilly's relationship with Bertie Ahern and whether O'Reilly used his media power to influence policy on matters that were important to his business interests. He gives a couple of instances when pressure was brought to bear on him as editor of the Tribune. But the overall impression Cooper gives is that there was very little interference and that he was free to edit the paper as he saw fit, even when he ran stories O'Reilly might not have liked. Would that have been the case if he had been working for Murdoch?

What comes across as well is that O'Reilly's concerns were primarily business-related, rather than political. Cooper examines the most-talked-about example of alleged interference, the front-page 'It's Payback Time' editorial in the Irish Independent on the day before the 1997 election. O'Reilly was known to be disappointed with John Bruton's Rainbow government because of its failure to deal with the MMDS TV signal distribution issue. But there was also a strong mood for change in the country at the time and, as Cooper reports, the polls had already shown the Rainbow was going to lose.

Not that it deserved to. Bruton's government, in power since 1994, had got the annual growth rate up to 9pc and it was Ruairi Quinn who had agreed our 12.5pc corporation tax rate with Europe (subsequently introduced by Charlie McCreevy) which fed the Celtic Tiger. Though, as Cooper says, that did not stop Fianna Fail subsequently claiming that the economic uplift was all their own work.

Most of the book deals with what happened from then on, the closed-door meetings and mutual back scratching between politicians and business people on the make as the boom really took off. It's a tawdry tale that does no credit to those directly involved or the culture which pervaded the higher circles at the time. Cooper's book tracks through the madness, telling the stories of the leading players, the developers, the big business people, the greedy unions, the politicians, the regulators asleep on the job.

Very few come out of this well. And certainly not Charlie McCreevy. In a chapter derisively headed 'Probably the Best Minister for Finance in the World', Cooper shows how McCreevy let public spending run wild -- in one year alone, 2001, government expenditure increased by 23pc while taxes grew by a mere 3.2pc. Is it any wonder we're in the present mess?

Even worse was the level of incompetence in financial regulation and the expansion of credit on a ludicrous scale to fuel the property bubble. And equally shocking was the plethora of schemes that allowed the big players to minimise their tax, from the Approved Retirement Funds to wheezes like the Christina O, the former Onassis yacht bought by Irish businessmen who were able to claim the millions they spent on its refurbishment against tax. Cooper, as you would expect from a financial specialist, is at his scathing best in this section, detailing how in Ireland tax really was for the little people.

It's a hugely entertaining as well as an instructive book. And there are even a few revelations. McCreevy never showed his Budget speeches to Ahern in advance and Brian Cowen did go to Ahern and tell him it was time to go. Plus, it's a terrific read, broken into short chapters like a screenplay.

But in the end, it does not answer the question posed in the title: Who Really Runs Ireland?

The title implies there was an elite which was a coherent group, acting in a concerted way to create a boom and enrich its members.

The truth is that the boom was a free-for-all; there was no organised plan by any elite, just frenetic greed and political opportunism. Cooper's book reflects that. It's a mosaic in which the individual stories add up to the big picture of the boom.

Who really runs Ireland? The evidence in this book suggests that the answer is no-one.

Irish Independent