DUBLIN -- When Gateway's Irish unit laid off sales manager Robert Bohan in January, he was so stunned he threw up.

An overreaction? Perhaps. In Ireland's booming high-tech economy, Mr. Bohan later reflected, he should have no trouble finding a new job.

But after calling on 40 tech companies in the past month, Mr. Bohan is still looking for work. He spent a recent afternoon signing up for unemployment benefits. "If I hear another person say it's easy to find a new job, I'll kill him," he says.

Mr. Bohan is learning a basic economic lesson: What America's high-tech industry gives it can also take away.

Since 1995, Ireland has been "the Celtic Tiger," an economy roaring with average annual growth of 9.6% thanks to a high-protein diet of low corporate taxes, high foreign investment -- mainly from the U.S. -- and a young, tech-savvy work force. The economy has grown so fast, in fact, that Ireland's European Union neighbors last month warned that it could be overheating. In an unprecedented reprimand, they objected to Irish plans to raise spending and cut taxes.

The admonition may have missed the mark.

Evidence is fast piling up that the Irish economy is already moderating -- thanks to the very factors that have driven much of its recent success: the U.S. economy and its high-tech companies. Dublin housing prices, though still high, are now rising at a slower pace. The labor market, though still suffering from a skills shortage, is no longer a job-seeker's paradise. This is especially true in the technology sector, which has driven Ireland's boom and now employs about 5% of the country's workforce. Consider what has happened since this past December:

Motorola Inc. sold its plant in Swords, Ireland, to Celestica Inc., a Canadian electronics manufacturer, leading to 750 layoffs. Nortel Networks Corp. announced plans to let go 40 people at its Galway plant, out of a total Irish workforce of 3,225. Gateway Inc. cut 28 jobs from its 1,600-person Irish staff. Intel Corp., the single largest U.S. investor in Ireland, decided to delay by more than a year a $2 billion (2.1 billion euros) investment to build a new computer chip plant next to its existing facility near Dublin, where it now employs 3,000 workers. Irish job cuts are also in the cards at Lucent Technology Inc. and 3Com Corp.

It's too soon to say whether this modest American retrenchment portends a soft landing for Ireland -- or a more serious downturn. Either way, the development has Irish officials on edge. Brendan Tuohy, the head of a government department that oversees the communications sector, has taken to flipping on CNBC's "Squawk Box" to hear the latest U.S. market news as soon as he arrives at his desk each morning. A nearby table is scattered with analysts' reports on Microsoft, Yahoo!, and other U.S. tech companies. "We have to consider the `what ifs'," he explains. "Just like any good company."

His concern is understandable. Since 1993, the booming tech sector as a whole has accounted for about one-quarter of Ireland's annual economic growth, according to Davy Stockbrokers, a Dublin investment firm. Indeed, technology exports accounted for more than a third of the Irish economy last year. Most of that activity is directly connected to the expansion of American technology companies here in the 1990s. Microsoft Corp., for example, estimates that its exports alone account for 2% of Irish annual economic growth.

The latest news is hardly upbeat: A survey of exporters' expectations plunged in December to the lowest reading in more than five years. Davy Stockbrokers, meanwhile, is "conservatively" estimating that 5,000 jobs will disappear in the Irish tech sector this year, twice the figure from each of the past two years.

Technology workers are braced for more pain. "A storm is coming," says Dermot Rogers, founder and chief executive officer of NewMediaCV, a Dublin recruiting agency for the tech sector.

He should know. Last summer, Mr. Rogers planned to nearly double his staff of 10 employees. But he scrapped that idea when the seriousness of the U.S. downturn became clear in December. For the moment, he is confident that Ireland can ride out the rough weather. But if the U.S. falls into recession, he says, "that's different."

To be sure, a moderate, or brief, U.S. downturn might be just what the Irish economy needs. With growth reaching an estimated 10% last year, economists and business leaders say a cooling off would help reduce inflationary pressure from soaring housing prices and rising wage demands.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that this is already happening. Around Dublin, for example, housing prices appear to be moderating, according to Irish real-estate firm Sherry Fitzgerald. Until recent months, a new house on the market would fetch the offer price within five days, says Rena O'Kelly, an associate manager in the firm's office in Dundrum, a bustling suburb surrounded by office parks 10 kilometers south of Dublin. Now, a for-sale sign sits on a house for three or four weeks or more, she says.

"We are starting to see people sitting on the fence a little longer," Ms. O'Kelly says. She estimates that house prices around Dublin will rise this year by about 10%, compared with 16% last year.

The job market is also showing signs of softening. Mr. Rogers, for example, says his NewMedia recruiting firm routinely placed about 10 to 20 clients in new jobs each week through much of last year. Since December, though, that number has halved, he says. Other recruiting firms report the same shift.

To understand why this is happening, consider the local planning of U.S. chipmaker Intel. Last June, Intel's president and CEO, Craig Barrett, came to Ireland to announce a $2 billion investment to build a new plant next to its existing one in Leixlip, a suburb 12 kilometers west of Dublin. The investment -- the single biggest in Ireland to date -- would create 1,000 new jobs over the next three years, Mr. Barrett promised. At the time, demand for microprocessors was booming and Intel was ramping up to meet it. On hand for the event was Ireland's deputy prime minister, Mary Harney: She praised the "substantial chain effect" that Intel's presence has had in Ireland since it arrived in 1989.

Then the notoriously cyclical chip market went soft. In December, Intel said the opening of the new Leixlip facility would be delayed by at least six months. In January, Intel warned that its global sales would drop 15% in the first quarter from the fourth. And late last month the company announced cost-saving measures.The Irish Industrial Development Agency, the government arm responsible for foreign investment, now expects the Leixlip expansion to be delayed more than a year. An Intel spokesperson in Dublin declines to comment.

The tighter purse strings are already squeezing some local businesses that have benefited from the high-tech boom. Just down the road from Intel's plant sits an 18th-century stone mansion that has been converted into the Leixlip House Hotel. It relies on Intel and Hewlett Packard Corp., which also has a plant in town, for 70% of its business. The hotel's conference-room bookings are down about 50% this year, says Christian Schmelter, the hotel's general manager. He thinks he knows why: As part of its global belt-tightening, Intel has cut back on employee travel. "We are not as bullish this year," he says.

The Springfield Hotel, another Leixlip establishment, is also feeling edgy. To cater to a growing demand from its big corporate neighbors, the hotel last year invested nearly 6 million Irish pounds (7.6 million euros) for a refurbishment that increased its number of rooms to 52 from 10. In January, the hotel had 70% occupancy most nights; in February that dropped to 30%, says head receptionist Rose Derwin. "Obviously there will be a change in the market," she says.

So far, U.S. high-tech companies are cutting back only modestly in Ireland because their main market is Europe, not the U.S. At Compaq Computers, for example, country manager Tom Keating says the company's Irish operation is still meeting "all of its targets."

That could change quickly. New computer purchases in Europe slumped to just 0.2% growth in the fourth quarter, compared with growth of more than 20% for much of 1999, according to research firm Gartner Dataquest. If the slowdown continues, it will likely hit the Irish subsidiaries of U.S. technology giants including Microsoft, which employs 1,600 employees in Ireland and supports vendors that employ an additional 2,000 workers.

The technology downturn has been especially brutal for indigenous Irish tech start-ups. Until Jan. 17, for example, Mark Henry was head of strategy for Dublin-based Ebeon Ltd., a fast-growing e-business consulting firm with 180 employees, plans to list on Nasdaq, and offices in New York, London and San Francisco. Then its main source of financing, Irish telecommunications company Eircom, abruptly pulled the plug.

The next morning, management called a staff meeting to break the news. Employees sauntering in to the meeting room joked that "things must be serious," when they saw all the senior executives assembled, recalls Mr. Henry. Then came the shocker: Ebeon was closing down; the doors would be locked the next day. Even though the business was growing in Ireland, the slowdown in the U.S. and elsewhere had weighed on the company. Many employees wandered off to nearby pubs "in total shock and disbelief," Mr. Henry says.

The wind had certainly shifted quickly: Just two months earlier, in November, Deutsche Bank AG had offered &70 million for Eircom's 51% stake in Ebeon, according to Mr. Henry, but Eircom turned it down, figuring it could make much more on the initial public offering. Now Eircom had decided it couldn't risk investing the &8.9 million Ebeon needed to stay afloat. (An Eircom spokeswoman says the extra financing was conditional on minority shareholders chipping in, which they refused to do. A Deutsche Bank spokesman acknowledges the bank was looking at Ebeon last autumn, but declines further comment.)

About a week after Ebeon collapsed, the 30-year-old Mr. Henry visited a Dublin recruiting company to look for a new job. He expected to hear back within a few days. But when he heard nothing after 10 days, Mr. Henry called the firm back.

"This has never happened to me before," Mr. Henry recalls the recruiter saying apologetically. Not a single firm, in skill-hungry Ireland, had responded to the advisor's inquiries, he says. Mr. Henry says he has since developed several leads on his own initiative.

On the same day that Ebeon imploded, the chief executive of another home-grown technology company, Fineos Corp., felt the need to calm his troops. A maker of software for banks and insurance companies, Fineos was preparing to go public even as the tech market was faltering. So CEO Michael Kelly sat down to write an e-mail to his staff.

"A lot of headlines recently might make people think that the technology sector in Ireland is in trouble," he wrote. But Fineos, he continued, has been "profitable from day one" and could easily weather the storm.

In December, Mr. Kelly had gone to London to seek more financing from a group of banks. He had been told the session would last about 20 minutes. Instead, "I was in there for an hour and a half," as the more cautious bankers pressed him for details. Though the planned listing is still on track, it will take at least a month longer than it would have a year ago, he estimates.

Meantime, Mr. Kelly says, Fineos has frozen plans for such things as hiring 70 or more employees, and reorganizing and furnishing its offices. U.S. customers here for a recent dinner were flown in on economy-class tickets found on the Internet, rather than first class, an employee says.

Much depends now on how fast the U.S. economy is actually slowing. Last summer, John McCarthy, a senior economist in the Irish central bank, estimated that a two-percentage-point drop in U.S. growth this year, accompanied by a weaker dollar, would slow Irish growth by three percentage points. It appears the U.S economy is slowing by twice that amount; does that mean the Irish economy will slow by six percentage points, to around 4%? Mr. McCarthy will say only that he is now updating his calculations.

For Mr. Bohan, the former Gateway employee, the downturn is already at hand. In recent days, he has talked to a U.K. computer firm about the possibility of running its Dublin office. But nothing has come through yet, even though he was regularly promoted during his three years with Gateway, he says.

Now, his frustration is mounting toward those who talk up Ireland's strong job market, including Ms. Harney, the deputy prime minister. After hearing her speak recently on the tech sector, Mr. Bohan called his mother, who knows Ms. Harney personally.

"Tell Harney," he said, "to shut up about how easy it is to get a job."