Christine Walsh possesses the sort of determination and confidence which we like to think characterises the Celtic Tiger economy.

After 15 years working as a personal assistant in Ireland she went to London six years ago and became a pub manager in the West End. Four years later, pregnant, she returned to Dublin because she wants to bring up her child in Ireland. Today her daughter is in a full-time creche and Christine is poised to go back to employment.

Since the start of the year she has worked on a Community Employment Scheme in Clondalkin and that's due to finish early next year - but she is already getting job offers, and when we spoke to her she was waiting for the phone to ring with an invitation to another interview.

There's one problem, though, and it's one which is increasingly affecting people who want to buy their own home - on the wages she is likely to earn, "unless I win the Lottery there's no way I could buy a house myself".

Instead, she intends to buy through the shared ownership scheme run by the local authorities. Under the scheme, she will buy a house in partnership with South Dublin County Council. She will pay rent on the part of the house she doesn't own and will eventually buy it out.

It's an option which is being increasingly taken up by would-be home owners who, in the past, would simply have bought their own house on the open market.

Right now, Christine is feeling very, very frustrated because "the county council won't entertain me at all because I am on a Community Employment Scheme. They want me to get part-time permanent employment."

Not one to give up easily, she has even organised a petition among her neighbours to try to persuade the council to let her on to the shared ownership programme - but the council insists that she must wait until she has secure employment.

South Dublin County Council says it is obliged to ensure that people buying houses in partnership with it have a secure income and will be able to pay their share of the mortgage and the rent.

There is no doubt that Christine will get a job, and soon, and she has been told that she can apply again when she has been working for six months.

That is what she intends to do - but she worries about the prospect which many people working on relatively low wages in a booming economy are concerned about: when she goes back, will house prices have escalated again with the expected fall in interest rates, and will even part-ownership of a house be beyond her?

"I have been approached by a couple of people to go and work for them," she says, "but the money is not great." She estimates she will earn about £200 a week. Until she gets a house on the shared ownership scheme, she and her baby will live with her mother and her two brothers. To rent a place of her own, she says, would cost about £400 a month and it is just not feasible to pay rent at that level, meet her other commitments and save towards the cost of a house. And, indeed, she may be underestimating what she would have to pay in rent.

In London, her work cushioned her from the high cost of accommodation there: as manager, she lived on the premises.

Like many other people who, before the boom, would never have applied for local authority housing, she has put her name down on the housing list. But just as it is for many others, it's a purely academic exercise: the last time she looked she was number 663 on the list. She reckons the daughter who is now happily pottering around a creche would be at least nine years of age before she got housing by that route.

She's not prepared to wait that long. Her ambition, she says, is to work full time and look after her daughter; and that includes having a home of her own.

When she goes back to work, she says, she will lose benefits such as the medical card, "which means a lot to me". But she is not a person to let that stop her. "I am half way there," she says confidently of her job-hunting.

She's a Celtic Tiger sort of person, all right: confident, determined and willing to make sacrifices.

Yet the boom in the economy has meant a boom in house prices which has left her, and others like her, in the situation that, as she puts it, "you can't get a house off the county council and you can't buy your own house".

"I'm 36, I've got a baby, I want to get on and do things for her and myself," she says, "but that doesn't get any consideration any more."