"Hello there and welcome to the Singles Club. . . I'm Susan the hostess and I'm here to see you enjoy your night out. Before we step inside, if you have a push-button phone please press your star button firmly now. . . to party on dial 5. . . welcome to our party, where the fun goes on 24 hours a day. . ."

If you get this far into the club, you will have already spent £1.16 (€1.47). For every minute more you venture further into its environs, you will spend another 58p. And it's easy to do. Plan to "meet" someone (listen to their recorded messages) or to "introduce" yourself to a few fellow party-goers (leave a message yourself) and Susan will be pocketing her share of the £5.60 or so you have spent for 10 minutes at this "party".

The "party" is a premium-rate phoneline service, "Susan" is Earmark Communications and "her" share is something in the region of 29.4p of every 58p per minute you've spent at the "party".

One of the fastest-growing sectors of the telecommunications market, premium-rate phone lines are identifiable by their 1530, 1540, 1550, 1559, 1560, 1570 and 1590 prefixes. The Republic has the fastest-growing market for them in Europe, with more than 8.5 million premium-rate calls in 1997 (the latest available figures) and a call rate per household of 7.2.

The lines are dedicated to providing particular information or entertainment to the customer at a rate considerably higher than the price of a local call. Depending on the prefix, the call can cost anything from 26p per minute (for the 1530 numbers) to £1.50 per minute (for the 1580 numbers). The most commonly used prefix, the 1550, costs the caller 58p per minute - or approximately the price of a call to Jamaica.

In the current directory, 190 premium lines are listed in the green pages. These offer everything from tarot-card reading, through the "Gay Guys' Complete Dating Service" to a line offering help with filling in farm-aid application forms.

Some service providers are in the premium-rate business purely to make money (as with the "party" scenario above). Others see it as an investment - a means of keeping in touch with customers and providing an on-going service.

The services on these lines are crudely divided into pre-recorded and live, with the live end the fastest-growing sector, particularly software and computer support.

An example of the live-service genre is that run by Medianet. Its 1580 (£1.50 per minute) line is run from the company's Sligo offices.

Managing director Mr Michael Vickers says the help-line is "not a money-spinner" but makes sense. His core business is selling computers and software. Previously, increasing man-hours were being spent on the phone giving expertise and help for free, but the 1580 line was a means of recouping some of those costs. Mr Vickers argues that phoning the line at £1.50 per minute is cheaper for the customer than calling in professional help, and he says that if the problem is not solved within 15 minutes the call is ended and Medianet calls the customer back.

This State's first premium-rate line appeared in 1988. It was started simply to make money, by Phonovation Ltd. The first access code prefix was 03000. And they were selling . . . horse racing results.

Mr Paddy Woods, Phonovation's managing director, says he and others saw the way the market was growing in Britain (where the first premium-rate line appeared in 1984). He and colleagues approached Telecom Eireann with their proposal.

"Things have changed dramatically since then," says Mr Woods. "There was an initial boom, then things levelled off and over the past two years the whole market has just mushroomed."

His company now acts as a middleman, between the companies providing the service, information or ideas and the phoneline providers. Phonovation updates information on the automated lines it runs; it transfers information calling customers have left on to disc and it collates information. Phonovation's clients are paid a percentage of the money it gets from Telecom Eireann.

Of the 26p-£1.50 per minute it costs the consumer calling a premium-rate service, a cut goes to the service provider, another to the line provider, another on VAT and another to each of the premium-rate service and the telecommunications regulators. Taking 1550 lines provided by Telecom Eireann as an example, of each 58p spent per minute by the caller 10.1p is VAT, 0.5p goes to each of the regulators, 29.4p goes to the service provider and 17.5p goes to Telecom.

Currently, just Telecom Eireann and Esat Telecom provide the actual phone lines for these services. Ocean, the telecommunications joint venture between the ESB and British Telecom, says it is not offering the lines "at the moment".

Regtel is the body that monitors the services and Mr Frank Hayden is the regulator.

"There are about 60 service providers operating in Ireland currently," he says. "And by the end of the year I would say there will be another 40." In terms of call volume, Telecom Eireann reports an increase of "about 30 per cent" over the last 12 months. Since it came into the premium-rate market last December, Esat Telecom has made 12,000 lines available to the sector, and, says product manager Mr Kevin White, the company sees it as "growing rapidly" and "ripe for expansion".

"We feel we offer an attractive package, with no connection fee and no monthly rental costs to the service provider."

To run a premium-rate line with Telecom Eireann, you would pay a £50 connection fee for each number and a £16.66 monthly rental charge.

Though the numbers and prices are the same as far as the caller is concerned, no matter who provides the line, the distribution of the revenue varies with Esat Telecom, depending on the volume of calls a service generates and the complexity of the service - for example, whether it involves data collection or not.

Though currently up to 40 per cent of the premium-rate market is accounted for by dating and "virtual-chat" lines, Mr Hayden sees the greatest growth in live lines, particularly in technical support. He also sees the live tarot-card reading and psychic lines expanding. Such socalled "superstitious" lines have been criticised as potentially exploitative of the vulnerable. Mr Hayden argues, however, that if people want to use tarot readers or psychics they will find them and spend up to £30 a session. At least, he says, the tarot-lines are cheaper, and calls must not exceed 15 minutes.

The lines do have something of a problem in being equated in many minds with sex-lines, he admits. This he attributes to market domination by these lines in the early 1990s. However, he believes this image is waning. Regtel has a code of practice by which all service providers must abide, and they are closely monitored.

Mr Hayden has said in the past that the industry would be well-served by a formal association to represent the good name of the service providers.

The other big area he sees for future development is the provision of Internet access. Where people now pay an Internet service provider and a phone company to use the Net, with premium-rate line access they would simply sign up with a phone company for access via a premium line. They would thereby bypass the Internet service provider.

Further deregulation in the European market is going to mean greater competition for premium-line service providers here, says Mr Hayden. Already, about 20 per cent of the lines accessible by customers here are in fact based in Britain.

At some stage, services will be available Europe-wide, he predicts. Lines will have to have the same access code from anywhere in Europe and a trial is already under way between a number of countries in Europe using 388 as the access code.

Implied are obvious threats and opportunities for Irish service providers.

We can speculate on how they will fare, whether they'll be reading their tarot cards for guidance. Or could it perhaps be a riotous party where the fun (of business) goes on 24 hours a day . . .