The initial reports were sensational, terrifying. Irish men, women and children from a "doomsday cult" had been arrested in Israel, stopped at the border, apparently bent on spreading death and destruction in the holy city of Jerusalem, perhaps even aiming to fuel a religious conflict that could usher in the End of Days and the messianic era.
Sensational, terrifying and, according to Ireland's Ambassador here, Mr Brendan Scannell, who spent five hours with the group on Sunday and 10 yesterday, the reports were a good distance wide of the mark.
Mr Scannell said the 25-strong group presented no kind of threat to anyone. Led by a psychologist and a psychiatrist, many of them suffer from various handicaps. They merely wished to mark the millennium in the Holy Land.
Mr Scannell, who has been in touch with the group since last month, has spent much of the past two days attempting to assure the Israeli authorities that they are harmless. To no avail.
Last night they were put back on a boat to Greece, via Cyprus.
The handling of their case underlines the extent of Israel's millennial panic. In January it deported members of Denver's Concerned Christians cult who had sold all their possessions and moved to Israel because their leader, Monte Kim Miller, had prophesied that he would die in the streets of Jerusalem in December of this year, and be resurrected a few days later.
The Concerned Christians appeared to be the first of what Israel fears may be a wave of religious extremists, flooding into the country as the new millennium approaches, some of them ready to resort to violence to bring about a prophesied apocalypse.
The deportation of the Concerned Christians was accompanied by leaked reports in the Hebrew media that the cultists may have been preparing "extreme, violent acts" to help prompt the End of Days.
But no hard evidence to that effect was ever brought. And after they were gone, some experts on religious fundamentalism warned that, by turning them into front-page news, Israel might actually have boosted the threat posed by the Concerned Christians, a marginal group which might now regard itself as truly significant, and might seek to enter Israel a second time, more subtly, and carrying the sour taste of their past ill-treatment.
Israel has set up a special task force to deal with millennium-linked threats, an expert team equipped to gauge the threat posed by various groups, and that task force was involved in yesterday's handling of the group from Ireland.
If Mr Scannell's assessment is accurate, the treatment afforded this group is considerably more heavy-handed, and inappropriate, than that meted out in January to the disciples of Monte Kim Miller.