What if Dick and Albert had been warm cuddly characters? What if they had attended prickliness management courses, and hugged and made up? Where would we be now? What if?

The destruction of the economy by the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition has left us up the proverbial creek with nay a paddle in sight. But, if back in 1997, just as the boom was really getting boomier – to use a Bertie term – what if Labour had been Fianna Fáil's partner?

The parties had ruled together for two years until late '94 when it all went up in smoke over who said what when to who about a child-abusing monk. Albert Reynolds resigned, and Dick Spring led the Labour Party into coalition with Fine Gael and Democratic Left.

What if Reynolds and Spring had kissed and made up, or if Albert still got the bum's rush but Bertie and Dick got together. Surely the same coalition would have been returned in 1997, and most likely 2002. Where would we be now?

One thing is sure, Labour would never have countenanced Charlie McCreevy as minister for finance. McCreevy wore Fianna Fáil clothes but his heart and soul were with the PDs. More than any other single player – including Ahern – McCreevy bears serious responsibility for where we are now at.

McCreevy's primary focus in Finance from the off was to reduce taxes. He made no secret of his policy, which was entirely in line with that of the Progressive Democrats.

When he assumed office in 1997, the standard and marginal income-tax rates were respectively 27% and 48%. Over the following five years he reduced the rates to 20% and 42%.

The rate of capital gains tax (CGT) in 1997 was 40%. In what his drooling admirers called a "bold move", McCreevy halved this rate in his first budget. The standard line thereafter was that the tax cuts contributed hugely to the boom. Strange then, that in the year McCreevy became finance minister, the economy was growing at 10%, a level it never achieved thereafter.

More sober minds have also commented on McCreevy's tax policy, including the current governor of the Central Bank Patrick Honohan, writing on the irisheconomy.ie blog earlier this year.

"In 1996, before Charlie McCreevy's first budget, standard- and higher-rate income taxes were 27% and 48%. Yet we were happy, growing rapidly and in effect 'Europe's Shining Light'. Such an income-tax schedule did not destroy the economy."

The halving of CGT did lead to a huge boost in receipts, and also sparked off a major lending spree which fuelled economic activity. However, two thirds of the lending went into construction, and we all now know where that led.

Ultimately, McCreevy destroyed the tax base to the point where today over one third of workers pay no tax and the top 5% are in a position to avail of the numerous tax breaks introduced over the last decade. Lower-paid workers did reap the benefits of the "tax is evil" policy, but they also paid more proportionately in high indirect taxes like VAT which was used to boost the exchequer coffers.

Would it have been different with Labour at the cabinet table?

Certainly, there was no mad rush to cut tax rates and thus erode the tax base. It is reasonable to assume that tax rates would be higher than they currently are, and that the lower paid would be expected to make a small contribution, which collectively would be significant to the exchequer. More to the point, the higher paid would not have as many shelters to hide away their dosh.

Instead, with the transactional taxes like VAT and stamp duty in the doldrums, there is far less recourse to income-tax receipts. And changing that is no small matter.

The illusion that the tax cuts led to sustainable investment is clung to by elements who scream that there must be no hike in taxes or we scare off investors. In reality, the rates in place before McCreevy went to work were not punitive or a disincentive to work or invest. Labour, it could be speculated, would have left well enough alone and we would be better off now.

As it turned out, Labour itself fell for the PD smoke and mirrors routine and was proposing its own tax cuts by the 2007 general election, just as the economy was en route to the cliff. By then, any form of tax was regarded as a unique evil to be dispensed with.

In September 2006, Michael McDowell told us that the country didn't need the proceeds from stamp duty. Now all those proceeds have gone and we see that Mick was talking through his hat. Mick himself, the prototype PD, is gone too, and we're still not the better for it.

McCreevy was also some boy for spending. "When I have it I spend it, and the mistake is trying to spend it when you haven't got it," he said in 2000. He spent it alright, on SSIAs (€2bn), on ludicrous decentralisation (cost as yet unquantified) and on a few pet projects, like €50m for his local racecourse, which the Comptroller and Auditor General found to be very poor value for money.

Even with a Labour penchant for spending, surely it couldn't have been more wasteful than the man who was in there?

In any event, Labour would have spent big during a boom, but at least it wouldn't have acquiesced in the destruction of the tax base. PD policy involved cutting taxes and increasing spending, which sounds like a script more suited to the cockpit of a kamikaze pilot.

McCreevy was no fan of regulating banks, but his soul sister Mary Harney was even less inclined to do so. In 2003, she insisted on the setting up of the financial regulator separate from the Central Bank. This is the regulator who fiddled while the banks burned money.

In 2005, just as the reckless lending was cranking up to new heights, McCreevy gave an insight into his thoughts on regulation.

"Don't try to protect everyone from every possible accident. Concentrate on the big things that really matter, and leave industry with the space to breathe and investors with the freedom to learn from their mistakes."

In January of the following year, the PDs director of policy Seamus Mulconroy, echoed these sentiments in a newspaper article.

If we seek to pre-empt every risk through regulation, we will simply add to the cost of doing business and drive businesses to other locations, he wrote.

"Light-touch regulation does not mean a free for all or the condoning of illegal or immoral practices; it does mean, as Charlie McCreevy says, striking the right balance between protecting the public and the integrity of the market and stifling business with burdensome regulation and unsustainable costs. As the Progressive Democrats have found to their benefit, advice from Charlie McCreevy is always worth listening to." Ain't that the truth, Séamie?

Would Labour have kept the same distance from the market, relying only on light touch?

Highly unlikely. Elsewhere in the destruction, free-market ideology was behind the privatisation of Eircom in 1999. (Telecom Eireann even had to be rebranded for the sale, to ensure it sounded sexy enough.) That is now accepted to have been a disaster in which ideology outbid any instinct to retain vital services.

Ireland's abysmal record in providing broadband is the legacy of the privatisation. Would Labour have gone along with it? We will never know.

Labour certainly wouldn't have taken on board private hospitals on public-hospital grounds, introducing sick folk up and down the country to the concept of the market. Right now, however, that policy, while controversial, looks like it may be heading for the knacker's yard for want of investors.

In the area of social policy, there is not a lot that separates the PDs and Labour. Both claim to have a liberal outlook, but if Labour ministers had their shoes under the cabinet table, it is highly unlikely that the compensation deal Michael Woods struck with the Catholic church would have come to pass.

The deal, hatched in 2002, capped the church's liability for child-abuse claims at €127m.

Seven years later, the compo bill is running at something north of €1.2bn. The church, quite obviously, did very well out of the negotiations with the tomato doctor, Mr Woods. Would somebody like Ruairi Quinn have been such a rollover?

Would Labour really have put up with the church skipping off with a meagre contribution to the bill?

Highly unlikely.

Not that the PDs would either, if they had had sight of the deal before it was signed off on, but the PDs were more concerned with the economy than society, and left messy stuff like child-abuse compensation to Fianna Fáil.

Despite the havoc that PD economics wreaked on the country, there is one debt which the nation owes the defunct party. They stopped Bertie Ahern in his Ceaucescu tracks as he tried to build a stadium in honour of himself.

The Bertie Bowl was most definitely on the political agenda in the latter half of 2002, despite a tightening of the public purse strings.

A little slice of eastern Europe was bound for west Dublin.

Nothing epitomises the madness of those years like the Bertie Bowl. In 2002, Croke Park's redevelopment was under way. Plans were advanced to have a makeover of Lansdowne Road. The FAI wanted its own home in Tallaght. And Bertie felt that all we were short of was a national stadium to balance things out a wee bit.

Harney made her feelings known. The PDs could put up with a lot, but not that. Bertie retreated with his tail between his legs, and the state was saved at least €1bn.

But the Bertie Bowl apart, there is little to commend the PDs contribution to the economy over the last decade. Their alleged fidelity to fiscal rectitude was exposed as a joke. They contributed hugely to the erosion of the tax base. And their adherence to Thatcherite principles, best articulated by McDowell's rejection of the concept of equality, ensured that now, just when solidarity is required, Ireland is a much more unequal place than it was in 1997.

Would things have been different if Labour was in the driving seat instead? Definitely, maybe.