Mr Peter de Jager has opted to change his millennium plans to silence his critics. In a recent article he said he would be seeing in the new century over a pint of Smithwicks in a bar in Doolin, Co Clare, to the strains of a traditional music session.

"I couldn't think of a better place to be, but then I got a lot of pressure to be in the air because I had said it would be safe to travel by air. So to answer my critics I will be flying 32,000 feet overhead at midnight on December 31st, 1999," Mr de Jager says. The Y2K specialist plans to fly from Chicago to London's Heathrow Airport, but he suspects that shortly afterwards he will be found in that pub in Doolin.

As one of the first to blow the whistle on the Year 2000 computer problem, the Irish-born Canadian has spent the last eight years struggling to bring it to the attention of the world. Over that period he has been dismissed by governments, industry and the media as a crank, fanatic, doomsday prophet and crook. Formerly a computer programmer, Mr de Jager has pioneered the dissemination of the Y2K message. For the past two years he has conducted between 10 and 15 interviews a day, and last year addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His website, www.year2000.com, receives 800,000 visitors each month, and costs him $400,000 to operate annually, without outside funding or sponsorship.

He says once he has got through January 1st, 2000, he plans to do a lot of sleeping, and eventually write a science fiction novel. "Going from Y2K to sci-fi isn't that big a jump."