If it's not the apocalypse, it's award-winning ideas for how to celebrate a brand-new era. For quite a few years now, the media has been moving into overdrive with its coverage of the new millennium, from babysitters' fees soaring to £50 an hour for next New Year's Eve to the Government's appointment of a millennium public relations officer who deals with `where's the party' requests. There are cheers and sneers for the £30 million set aside for millennium celebrations and monuments, and speculation about where you still might get a seat or a table for the night - if you've been foolish enough to leave it as late as this to book.

There are also a few more sober voices, such as that of Dublin's Archbishop Desmond Connell, reminding us that this is all about the most important event in the history of Christianity - the birth of Christ. And then, from the grim brigade, many a tale of the approach of the apocalypse. Which, in the good-news-is-no-news-at-all world, is really the place to start.

pre-millennial tension

Visions of impending global catastrophe are regular page-fillers these days, particularly in US tabloids such as the National Enquirer and the distinctly fiction-oriented Weekly World News, both widely available in Ireland.

Damian Thompson, author of an investigation of such visions, The End of Time, has described hundreds of apocalyptic prophecies he came across while researching his book "in every imaginable medium". Such is the increase in these various visions and prophecies that the media has lumped them in with a more general, less supernatural sense of anxiety and coined the term PMT - Pre-Millennial Tension - to describe the phenomenon.

In fact, doomsday is not just another Nineties issue to add to the collection. According to Thompson, belief in "the end" is one of the driving forces of history: "Apocalyptic belief is like a relentlessly mutating virus which can adapt to surroundings . . . Millenarianism - the intoxicating certainty that civilisation as we know it is about to end - can drive ordinary citizens . . . to join communities run by sex-crazed gurus. It inspired the slaughter of Jews . . . and Stalinist purges." Behind all the fear and panic lies an all-pervasive sense of disorientation, says Thompson.

And in a bid to find some semblence of hope, people are joining religious sects in their droves. "Since 1981 the number of Pentecostal Christians in the world has risen from 90 million to 400 million," he says.

This mass conversion is not simply a result of the TV manipulation of "televangelists", he says; it is explained by "a sense of overpowering urgency missing from `respectable Christianity', and a belief that when the end comes, people in the fold can expect to sail off into salvation."

At the other end of the scale, there are the millions who plan to bypass the death and destruction phase and head straight for the party. There's more fever-pitch coverage from the media on this one: Irish castles are almost all booked out, hotel rooms in cities around the country are rapidly disappearing, and the Government has appointed a committee to oversee millennium celebrations and ways to mark the event.

millennium babies

Much like the visions and prophecies, there are any number of stories of wild millennium party plans in the papers every week. For more than a few hearty types, the hottest idea for a millennial party is apparently to give birth to a baby at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Just how many potential "Millennium Babies" are being conceived over the next few weeks remains to be seen.

But again, the many, many stories in the media swing wildly in mood: some tell us about the likely sponsorship goodies for the lucky first Y2K babes; others warn about the pressure on maternity services as women rush to have their babies on time - as doctors argue about the "rules" for determining who emerged first.

Depending on what report you see on any given day of the week, next year sees our world transform into heaven or hell. But whatever it's going to be, it will certainly be eventful: roll on the Noughties.