There is a class of throwaway paperback produced in the US which glories in sub-titles such as How to Profit from the Coming Depression or How to Beat the Next Great Inflation. After last week's thoughts on inflation in child-care costs, perhaps there's room for a title, How to Avoid Getting Mauled by the Celtic you-know-what.

What can be done about such pockets of inflation? To answer, you have to ask, "By the Government?" and "By me?"

The answer given for Government is familiar: with interest rates outside our control, give no tax cuts next December, make no increases in public spending and rein in demand. It's beginning to sound like a retrofit of fiscal rectitude. What a shame. Only one year after a government was openly elected with a surreptitious, clandestine programme to cut taxes, it is being told that it cannot cut taxes without damaging the economy. The left-wing, but ever-righteous, howls of protest that greeted Charlie McCreevy's tax-cutting budget are now replaced by sombre, serious tones urging fiscal tightening in order to combat rising inflation. You can guess which approach is likely to be the more effective. It is a shame. The very people who could do with tax cuts, those hit by rising house prices and rising child-care costs, among other things, may not get them, at least this year. Who are those people? According to Peter Cassells in an interview in this newspaper earlier this week, they are those earning between £15,000 and £20,000 a year (at least, they are among that group, because if you are childless, with no need to buy a house and earning £18,000, you're probably not doing badly).

They form more than 60 per cent of trade union membership and are the backbone of Partnership 2000. They will put pressure on the Government for rising standards of living expected under Partnership 2000, not just for some fragile hope that they can continue to run to stand still (to paraphrase Mr Cassells).

So, ICTU confirms that there is nothing wrong with tax cuts, in principle, and in practice, they are wanted now.

So long as they are targeted at a group which forms up to 60 per cent of union membership, that is. To argue for such targeting is Mr Cassells's prerogative; it is not the whole story, needless to say.

"Neo-fiscal rectitude" (no tax cuts, stop spending, pay off the debt) is against tax cuts benefiting large numbers of PAYE workers. But Partnership 2000 demands it. The Government is in a bind over this. There is no easy answer indeed, there is no answer at all if you look at one budget to reconcile the two positions.

So, this year the Government probably wants to deliver benefits to as many people as possible, but benefits that are unlikely to raise demand for inflation-prone goods and services. What these are is not easy to say. Is £1 more spent on public health care as inflationary as a £1 tax cut? Would tax breaks for child care just drive up prices? Increased child benefit may do that: there is a suspicion that disposable nappy prices have sometimes risen immediately upon children's allowances increases.

So much for the Government. If you are getting squeezed by inflation in your household budget, what can you do? Can you afford to wait for any government to solve the problem? As long as inflation is confined to particular areas of your budget, you can try to avoid it. You can move, with a job, to a part of the country where the financial and time burdens imposed by living in Dublin, particularly, are fewer.

Civil servants are understandably keen on such relocations, and others, for example in the banks, who can maintain the same job at the same salary could look seriously at it.

As regards child care, you can alter arrangements. You could get a job on a night shift while your other half worked days. You can try to share child care with others. You can press for a pay increase unilaterally, if you have the chance. You can say: "Hang it! I'm getting on the inflation bandwagon" and change job solely for a higher salary. Or you can just try to economise on other costs, a sort of personal fiscal rectitude.

All of these involve dislocation and none is easy to do. Behind the contemplation of such alternatives by a lot of people today, people like Peter Cassells's trade union members, is the determination that you, middle-class man, working woman, were not born to sing along grimly: "We're caught in a trap...". To look at the other man's greener grass is one thing; to see one's own patch overrun by weeds is quite another.

Oliver O'Connor is an investment funds specialist