Proof that the Irish have not yet achieved the heights of geekiness present in the United States comes from an engineer from one of the major Irish Internet service providers, whose job it was to keep an eye on systems as the date rolled over from 31.12.99 to 01.01.00.

In contrast to the US, where traffic surged over the Internet right at midnight, Ireland had a dip in the number of modems actively connected to the Net in the 15 minutes before and after midnight. "In fact," says the engineer, "I've almost never seen as little traffic going to the countrywide network as at zero-hour. This proves beyond all doubt that Irish people still have not quite lost the art of partying to this new fangled Internet invention." Er, well, almost. "But they logged back on again after that, the sad gits," he adds.