The study comes at an unnerving moment. On Friday, Irish government statistics indicated that unemployment claims had increased 1% from April to May.

The news was enough to spook Davy economist Rossa White, who warned in a research note of "the first tentative sign of housing spillover into the rest of the economy".

White continued, "However, we do not expect major deterioration in the labour market until late-2007/early-2008. Housing activity reached an inflection point in September 2006: the lags involved are long."

The jobless numbers came just hours after news of probable job losses at Dell as part of a worldwide cull of 10% of the PC maker's workforce and days after further job losses were flagged at Eircom and O2.

An OECD working paper dated 17 April 2007, 'Housing Markets and Adjustments in Monetary Union', examined studies of 49 residential construction booms in 23 countries. The study did not examine current house price booms such as Ireland's, and so did not take into account Irish housing completions in the first three months of 2007, down 9% on the previous year according to government statistics.

"How common are soft landings?" asks the report. Defining a soft landing as a relatively small reduction in residential investment, the authors conclude, "not especially common". In fact, the report goes on, "if a soft landing is defined as something that is both mild and gradual, there has not been a single case out of the 49 boom-bust cycles."

The OECD working paper adds, "a recession typically follows a downturn in real house prices. Residential investment normally turns down about a year before house prices."

Downturns last 2.5-times as long in countries that have no control over their monetary policy, the OECD working paper also found. Euro membership means Ireland does not have an independent monetary policy.

Separately, there is evidence from census data that the rate of Irish home ownership has declined over the past decade. In the 1996 census, 78% of private households lived in an owner-occupied dwelling. The rate of home ownership fell to 77% in 2002 and to 75% in 2006.