The dance media that emerged from clubland across Europe during the 1990s is now considered a powerful voice of youth culture. At first, the traditional media shunned what was seen as a phenomenon tainted by drug use, but they have now scrambled to embrace the dance phenomenon in a bid to win over youth audiences.

Club culture has become synonymous with youth culture in Ireland. From the early days on the sun-drenched Mediterranean island of Ibiza, where the dance scene first exploded, to the illegal raves in large warehouses in the north of England, clubland has matured from the underground sub-culture to a commercial entertainment industry. The travelling super-clubs and dance nights regularly entertain thousands of clubbers in Dublin and beyond. Liverpool super-club Cream have inspired their own fashion label at teen-haven Top Shop.

The British media went dance crazy a few years ago. The Sky One series Ibiza Uncovered became the stuff of urban legend, with the crazy antics and hedonistic lifestyles on show ushering in a new era of dance docu-soap programming. And the audience wanted more. BBC Radio 1 got right in behind the big-name clubs and well-known DJs and then the scramble began. This was a huge U-turn. Ireland is still playing catch-up (a dance-oriented radio station for Dublin has been delayed by legal battles) but the dance media has become much more visible in everyday life.

A dedicated forum for dance-crazy clubbers has now emerged in Ireland. At first, it was just the odd pirate radio station and weekly club listings, but within a few years there was a range of dance magazines and club culture titles and radio and television programmes. As the Internet became more widely available, Internet radio stations and dedicated websites sprung up with daily updated listings and live webcasts of young revellers getting sweaty at clubs around the world.

The DJ's who rule the decks and airwaves have also found success in the mainstream music charts, playing to listeners who range in age from 12 to 45. While 2FM, dubbed the youth arm of RTE, only plays around 13 hours of dance music, at weekends, this gap in the market has been filled by the often raw sounds of the pirate stations. A thorn in the side of authorities, the hugely successful illegal Dublin set-ups, such as Pulse, Nova, Energy and Kiss FM, blast out dance tracks 24 hours a day, with some chart and pop music thrown in for variety.

Initially, pirate radio stations were providing an alternative outlet for dance music, now they've become lucrative cash-cows, mainly by promoting club nights. Dance music used to be perceived as being nothing more than loud noise for teenagers, high on ecstasy, to jump up and down to - now it's a lifestyle.

"Dance is the 21st century version of rock'n'roll," says 2FM DJ John Power. "Right across Europe, there's this really vibrant and cool dance scene." Power says that most big cities have four or five major independent publications dedicated to club culture. These publications have become style textbooks.

With a front-cover masthead declaring itself to be "Ireland's club and youth culture bible", BBm is one of Ireland's biggest clubland titles. Published in Belfast, this monthly magazine has around 75,000 readers, with about 50 per cent in the 18 to 21 age bracket. "Set up around five years ago, BBm is a dance and club culture title that merges the music with the lifestyle. We outsell many of the big British publications in Ireland by a ratio of four to one," says editor Judith Farrell.

Ministry Magazine, Muzik and Mix Mag are some of the big, glossy British monthly publications. Ministry magazine grew out of the London super-club, Ministry of Sound, and is now hugely popular. Slang and youth culture go hand in hand. Dance media titles are littered with so much lingo that it makes a regular PC spell-check redundant. Most of it concerns drugs and drug-taking. This is one of the distinguishing facets of dance and club culture titles. "Monged out", "gurning like an ecstasy virgin on double-doves", "muntered off their nuts", "pillennium" are examples of the slang used.

Recreational drug-taking is a regular activity in clubland. Teenagers and twenty-somethings are thought to be taking ecstasy, speed, cocaine, acid - and more - when they go out at night. Some do, some don't, but the attitude in clubland to what are called "recreational" drugs is more blase than that of parents and the authorities. There is no taboo associated with drugs here, and the dance media reflects this.

The mainstream media falls prey to periodical judgmental hype on the subject, but objective, informed articles educating young readers do not follow the hysteria.

In Dublin, the East Coast Area Health Board is currently involved in an observation study of recreational drug-taking in some of the top nightclubs. Under the guidance of educational officers Stephen Harding and Maeve Shanley, this research is part of an ongoing project called the Dublin Dance Safety Initiative - Staying Alive. The project findings are almost ready to be presented in public and should recommend the adoption of a number of initiatives to safeguard clubbers.

"We try to give a realistic and honest picture of club culture, and that includes promoting more awareness of drugs. We never condone or encourage drug use, we just say be careful," says BBm editor Judith Farrell. This is the responsible approach. A December issue of 7 Magazine, a London-based clubbing title, carried a report warning that female users of ecstasy may be more likely to die than their male counterparts.

"Over here on the drugs desk, we had, ahem, `high' hopes for 2000," writes Stephen Armstrong in the opening lines of an end-of-year article on drugs in Ministry Magazine.

"The year 2000 was the year that people stopped caring. Drug-taking went mainstream," wrote Armstrong. "Your drugs correspondent got so wankered that he had to be helped off the dancefloor," he concluded. Elsewhere in the magazine, such views are balanced.

Ministry's clubs editor Ben McArdel wrote: "It's not been all smiles back here in the UK though - a spate of E deaths across the country showed us just how badly drug education has been failing us, and just how misguided some people can be."