In the early part of last year, as the latest report by Dr Peter Bacon notes, the housing market was "characterised by runaway inflation and widespread panic-buying of new houses" - particularly in Dublin.
Just 12 months later - although prices remain relatively high - the hysteria has gone.
The report cites "considerable and growing evidence" of a slowdown in the rate of increase in new house prices - a trend also now being mirrored in the second-hand sector - and says the annual survey of the Irish Auctioneers' and Valuers' Institute agreed that the steam had gone.
And who deserves the credit for this? Step forward Peter Bacon and the Government which "responded quickly with a series of measures" to implement his first report last April, entitled "An Economic Assessment of Recent House Price Developments" - commonly known as the Bacon Report.
Bacon 2, as the latest report has been dubbed, quotes the IAVI as saying that "in large measure, any reductions in the rate of house price inflation are down to the speedy implementation of the Bacon recommendations". Other authorities on the market are liberally quoted to the same effect.
Given that around a third of all new homes coming onto the market were being acquired by investors, the withdrawal of their tax relief on borrowings was the single most potent instrument in bringing about the slowdown evident now. Stamp duty reform to free up the second-hand market also played a role.
Just as important in terms of its impact, according to Bacon 2, was the Government "announcing and implementing a strategy in a manner that had credibility in the market and in this way breaking the psychology of house price inflation and expectations of further acceleration".
When Peter Bacon and Associates were first commissioned to examine house price inflation within months of the Government taking office, there were legitimate fears among planners and conservationists and others that the report they produced would call for indiscriminate land rezoning.
In the event, it did nothing of the sort. What the report underlined very clearly was that rezoning more and more land would not, of itself, boost the supply of houses. There were other matters to be resolved, notably the "pipeline constraints" of inadequate water and sewerage.
The Government introduced its Serviced Land Initiative in response to this problem, allocating a total of £39 million to assist the local authorities in bringing forward plans to service more land. Perhaps the local authorities were caught off-guard because the results achieved so far have been paltry.
Only one scheme, involving a yield of 300 houses, has been completed in the Dublin region and three others are due to start this year. Clearly, the "streamlined unit" set up within the Department of the Environment has a tough task if there is to be an early prospect of spending the £39 million.
The other major issue addressed by the first Bacon report - with the aid of Mr Fergal MacCabe, architect and town planner - was housing density. For years, as it pointed out, we have been developing our new suburbs to a density which is incredibly low by European standards. This had to stop.
Building new suburban estates at six or eight houses per acre is not only grossly wasteful of land as resource, it also creates other problems. As the Fingal county architect, Mr David O'Connor, recently noted, cars are needed even for the most simple tasks - such as getting a pint of milk.
Everything is distant - shops, schools, pubs, churches and other facilities which are much closer at hand in a more dense urban environment. Low density housing also makes public transport uneconomic and it may not even be worthwhile for the gas company to put in a piped gas supply.
Following on from Bacon 1, the Department of the Environment commissioned Mr MacCabe, in association with McCrossan O'Rourke Architects and Jones Lang Wooton, chartered surveyors, to draw up guidelines for higher density housing. Published last week, these recommend a doubling of density.
Now issued in draft form for public consultation, the new guidelines stress that this does not mean simply taking a given number of suburban houses and multiplying it by two. A much higher level of design will be required to produce good living environments at higher densities.
Bacon 2 suggests that a circular letter to the local authorities - which is all we have seen so far - will not be adequate. It recommends that the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, should use his powers to issue a general policy directive laying down a set of "sound principles".
The report also endorses something that the Irish Planning Institute and others have been advocating for years - the need to draw up a national spatial planning strategy identifying towns outside the Dublin conurbation which might become growth centres, such as Navan, Kildare or Arklow.
That's precisely what Prof Colin Buchanan suggested in his 1969 report on regional development in Ireland. But the then Fianna Fail government could not bring itself to make the hard choices that needed to be made and, in 1972, announced that there would in effect be no regionalisation.
This laissez-faire approach to controlling the growth of Dublin inevitably meant that the capital would continue to expand, eventually reaching "critical mass" in European terms. Whether major inward investment can now be redirected elsewhere to support new growth centres is a moot point.
Finally, Bacon 2 admits that the first report was criticised in certain quarters for giving short shrift to tenants in the private rented sector. It makes up for this lapse by recommending a review of landlord-tenant legislation aimed at giving tenants more security as well as making rent more tax-deductible.
The Irish obsession with home ownership, part of the legacy of dispossession, makes us lose sight of the fact that most people in Europe are quite happy to live in private rented accommodation. The home ownership rate in Switzerland, one of the world's richest countries, is under 30 per cent; it is 95 per cent in Bangladesh.