FORECASTING the end of the world is a tricky business, if only because of the risk of waking up to discover that it hasn't happened.
But those who are in the business get used to it.
Or so I was told by a man who'd carried a sandwich board in Oxford Street for 15 years, bearing the message, fore and after: The End Is Nigh.
It must have been a dreadful threat in the 1940s, when his career began. By the time he came to stand near our soapbox at Hyde Park Corner, in 1960 or so, it had begun to wear a bit thin.
I asked him about it one freezing afternoon when we'd taken shelter in a Lyons Corner House.
Wasn't it embarrassing to meet the same people, week after week, year after year - living proof that his message was, to say the least, premature?
He smiled, shrugged and he pointed out that some of my mates had been forecasting the collapse of capitalism for almost as long as he'd been spreading the bad news in Oxford Street.
He was right. More to the point, if capitalism had collapsed, far from rising to the pinnacles of power, the people to whom we spoke would end up as usual bearing the brunt of it.
But the sandwich man wasn't alone in his belief that society, as he knew it, had reached the end of the road.
The German philosopher, Hegel, took the view that further development was unlikely, or even impossible.
The best that man might do, he thought, was to sit back and analyse what had happened. And that was at the beginning of the last century.
Almost 200 years later, a deputy director of the US State Department's Planning Staff called Francis Fukuyama observed the collapse of the Soviet Union and came up with the related idea, which he called the end of history.
AS Geraldine Mitchell wrote in The Irish Times: "Fukuyama does more than plant a gigantic nail in the coffin of communism, though he does that with glee, too."
"His basic argument is that, with the crumbling of the communist world, as well as the defeat of other rival ideologies such as fascism this century, we are seeing Hegel's theory of the evolution of human society reach fulfilment.
"History has reached the end of its course with the triumph of liberal democracy and there is nowhere left to go.
There will be no further, progress in the development of the underlying principles and institutions, because all the really big questions [have] been settled."
In other words, the game was up and the West had won.
There was nothing more to discuss. We were all social democrats now. George Bush proclaimed a new world order and the United States was to be the world's policeman.
Dr Fukuyama had driven home his message with some regret: "The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced."
And what would replace the ideological struggle? As Dr Fukuyama saw it: "Economic calculations, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."
Conservatives on this side of the Atlantic got the message and cheered. Margaret Thatcher was beginning to be awarded the status of prophet in the wider world just as her revolution had started to run out of steam at home.
Bemused English travellers, whose attitude to what she was making of their society ranged from unease to revulsion, discovered that a new generation in middle and eastern Europe had taken to her much as an earlier generation in the West had fallen for Chairman Mao.
Here, even the most conservative politicians had always shied away from the title conservative and those who'd taken to Mrs Thatcher's views in the 1980s still kept their distance in public.
It was one thing to believe in gung ho privatisation and rolling back the power of the state; quite another to step from the closet and declare a preference for Thatcherism.
Dr Fukdyama's end of history - the replacement of ideology by the business of satisfying sophisticated consumer demands - suggested a way of sidestepping the problem.
IDEOLOGY has always had a left wing and somewhat foreign air to it, in Irish ears: a legacy perhaps of fierce Cold War reactions to any hint of unorthodoxy, whether it blew in with Yugoslav footballers or Hollywood films.
But while those on the left seemed content to accept the label and follow the flag, their much more numerous opponents in the catch all parties were unwilling to put up their colours and declare their interests.
An end to ideology would surely undermine the left and leave the way open for those of the right who had yet to acknowledge publicly that their policies were rooted in any ideology, let alone one shared with Mrs Thatcher.
So, for a while it seemed as if history was indeed at an end as Fianna Fail, who'd run a minority government with Fine Gael's support, took the plunge and formed a fully fledged coalition with the Progressive Democrats.
FF's partnership with Labour, followed by the tripartite coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left, looked like completing the social democratic circle - until politicians on all sides, vested interests and the electorate began to take stock and ask themselves about the next election.
The choice of alignments was assumed, even before there was any discussion of formalities. No one spoke of significant policy differences between FF and FG, but hardly anyone thought a coalition between them worth considering.
And no one was surprised when it was suggested, first by Mary Harney, then by Dick Spring, that it was the partners of the bigger parties who would determine the character of the new administration.
Given the refusal of the Progressive Democrats to share power with Labour or Democratic Left and the resistance of the left to any partnership with the PDs, the choice is now as clear as it's likely to be.
THE next government will be a centre left Coalition of FG, Labour and DL or a centre right coalition of FF and the PDs.
It won't be plain sailing for either side. Already there are recriminations about name calling, though it isn't altogether clear whether Mary Harney, who raised the issue, thinks that calling Michael McDowell right wing, as Dick Spring did, is worse than calling Mr Spring morally braindead, as Mr McDowell did.
Of course Ms Harney, like her old colleagues in FF, has strong populist leanings and may be at least as worried about lining up on the right as some of them appear to be, even if it means having Independent Newspapers on their side.
Dermot Ahern has been quoted as saying that FF would be an "extremely good halter" on the PDs' "strident views that they would willy nilly privatise". Which sounds a little like locking the stable door after the jockey has bolted with the family silver.