Remember this time last year? How individualisation of the tax code brought to the boil all that simmering unease about women's roles and the care of children in this society? How feelings ran so deep that it became an unsafe topic to raise even in the most innocuous gatherings last Christmas?

Ready for another snapshot view of the direction of this society to ponder over this Christmas? The Budget is tomorrow week and the Government seems set on continuing down the path of skewing the tax code to favour dual-earning over single-income couples.

Later this week, almost on the eve of the Budget, the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF) is due to publish a report which concludes that the top 20 per cent of households who received 80 per cent of the benefits of the individualisation introduced last year will receive 98 per cent of the benefits when the Government's plans are completed.

A draft of the report has been in circulation in interested circles for some time and has been seen by this column. What a pity it will be published so late.

The NESF represents all the social partners and supports individualisation in principle, as the Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs, Dermot Ahern, pointed out to the National Women's Council last month. "There is almost unanimous support for individualisation in policy circles," he said, and the Government was committed to continuing it.

Why, if individualisation is so regressive in its effects, do sensible people like the members of the NESF support it? The NESF report does contain serious qualifications. "Greater priority needs to be given to limiting these regressive effects," the report states. Watch this space - or rather watch next week's Budget to see if the Government has chosen to hear this part of the NESF's views.

The NESF also supports the idea that caring unpaid work - the work of spouses who stay at home - should be recognised in the tax and social welfare systems. It says the home carer's allowance introduced last year is "flawed" because the carer's spouse receives it and because it does not benefit cohabiting couples or those on social welfare. But the NESF adds: "We want to make it quite clear that we are not making a blanket argument against the inclusion of dependency or family provisions in the tax or transfer system".

Perhaps, then, there is a middle ground which can remove acrimony from the argument, a case to be made that the problem is not so much individualisation itself as the Government's way of implementing it.

Before Budget 2000, a married couple on one income paid equal tax to a dual-earning couple on the same income. The best argument in my view for individualisation is that this wasn't fair because the couple with a spouse at home benefited from that spouse's availability to care for children, and that this constituted untaxed income in another form.

The best counter-argument to individualisation is that tax relief for dual earners relative to single-income households took no account of whether they had children. Budget 2000 set the stage for a debate in which aggrieved dual earners could imagine their opponents as couples with stay-at-home "trophy wives" with no children to care for; and one-income couples could imagine their opponents as "dinkies" (double income/no kids). Either could be true.

What is the Government's aim with individualisation? Like so much of its motivation, it seems to come down to the tax-cutting imperative. Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy said last year it was designed to bring more single people off the top tax rate, in effect by widening tax bands to give them much of the benefit of reducing tax relief from spouses at home.

Budget 2000 began a three-year process which would eventually have a one-income household paying almost as much tax as a single person on the same income. The tax code would merely continue to recognise the presence of another adult in the house through the existing personal tax credit, worth £1,034 per annum. The home carer's allowance introduced after the Budget is worth £660 per annum.

If the Government's plan were fully implemented, at current tax rates a high-income, dual-earning couple would pay £6,160 less tax than a single-earner household on the same income. Which dual-earning couples didn't benefit from last year's measures? Anyone on social welfare, anyone with an income too low to pay tax, indeed any couple earning less than £28,000 per annum.

This year, if the Government continues as planned, there will be no gains from individualisation for couples on incomes below £34,000. The following year, the gains will all be for those on over £45,000.

The Government set individualisation in the context of a tax-cutting package, designed to benefit high earners and single people in particular. In later debate, individualisation was presented as a way of increasing work incentives for married women, even though it only affected women in relatively high-earning households.

How much more acceptable individualisation might have been if the Government had instead followed the approach of the earlier working group report on the tax treatment of families. This argued that the pre-2000 tax treatment of married couples was a poorly targeted benefit for families and that resources should instead be redirected towards child benefit.

Had the Government gone this route, the gains from reducing tax relief for spouses at home should have been channelled straight back to families with children. But this is a Government which sees tax relief as returning to people what they have earned. Benefit payments, meanwhile, are regarded as State largesse to the needy, largesse which drives up Government expenditure.

For many reasons, this is an important Budget; an election Budget, that much is clear. If, as seems likely, the Government succumbs to the temptation to attempt to buy votes by large-scale tax cuts, this will drive up prices as we compete to buy those things like houses and childcare which are already in short supply. Industrial unrest will worsen. The Government will be gambling that we are collectively so myopic and greedy that we will vote on the basis of cash in hand now, whatever the longer-term consequences.

This Budget will also tell us if Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats have learnt anything from last year's post-Budget furore. From the manner in which they proceed with individualisation, it will be possible to tell what value they put on equity and the care of children.