Sráid an Mhuilinn · Co. Cork
The smallest place ever to host the Eurovision - Europe watched the 1993 contest from a Cork horse arena, and the town has quietly gone back to work ever since.
Millstreet is a Duhallow market town that grew around an 18th-century mill and never lost the working habit. Seventeen hundred people, a long main street, a livestock economy, and the Derrynasaggart Mountains close enough to feel protective. It sits roughly halfway between Mallow and Killarney on the N72, at the foot of Clara Mountain, where north Cork bleeds into Kerry. This is farming country first and a destination second.
Then there is the thing everyone knows. In 1993 a local businessman named Noel C. Duggan persuaded RTE to bring the Eurovision Song Contest to the Green Glens Arena - a venue he had built in 1973 for show jumping and cattle. It made Millstreet the smallest community ever to stage the contest, and some 300 million people watched Niamh Kavanagh win for Ireland in a building that normally smelled of horses. The town treats it the way it treats everything: it happened, it was grand, and then the arena went back to its day job.
That day job is serious. The Green Glens still hosts the Millstreet International Horse Show, one of the country's top equestrian competitions, and over the years has held everything from Steve Collins defending his WBO world title to two European Juggling Conventions. Two kilometres out, Drishane Castle layers a 15th-century MacCarthy tower house, a Wallis family mansion of around 1730, and a convent school the Sisters of the Infant Jesus ran until 1992. The award-winning railway station, opened in 1853, is still on the Mallow-Killarney-Tralee line and still stops trains.
Come for the walk up Clara, a pint in the Wallis Arms, and the strange satisfaction of standing in a place that hosted a continent and shrugged. Do not come for a food scene - there isn't one. Use Millstreet as a base for the Sliabh Luachra music country to the west and you will have read the place right.
