Over five mornings around the winter solstice this December, small groups will stand inside Newgrange in County Meath while the rising sun reaches the back of its chamber. Ireland's Office of Public Works filled the places by lottery in October: 38 winners, each allowed one guest, drawn from 34,263 online entries by pupils of three local primary schools.1
Ireland appears in sixteen rankings on YouPickBest, and the tomb is only one way in. The country is an option itself on three of them. On the other thirteen it competes through a cliff, a boxer, a band, a novel, a holiday or a drink, usually against countries and traditions many times its size.
Ireland's best-known entries started with an audience of a few dozen people, in a tomb, a pub or a delayed flight, and ended up competing with whole countries.
Ireland vs Italy: the best country in Europe to visit
The best country to visit in Europe is a 25-country ranking, and Ireland enters it as one of the smaller ones. France, Spain and Italy, three of the most visited countries in the world, hold the obvious claims. Scotland, Iceland and Norway compete with Ireland for the same kind of holiday, built around weather, cliffs and long drives.
Ireland's offer is its western coast. The tourist board has signposted it as one continuous route, the Wild Atlantic Way, running from the Inishowen peninsula in Donegal to Kinsale in County Cork.
Italy brings Rome, Florence and Venice and a cuisine that most of Europe imitates. Ireland brings a country where the pub counts as a sight and the best-known views cost nothing to stand in.
Twenty-seven places, all of them in Ireland
The 27 best places to visit in Ireland has only Irish options, so the question becomes which Ireland. It runs from Dublin, Galway and Cork to the Aran Islands, the Burren and Malin Head at the northern tip of Donegal.
The Cliffs of Moher in County Clare are the postcard. They rise 214 metres above the Atlantic and draw more visitors than any other natural site in the country.
Skellig Michael is the harder trip: a rock off the Kerry coast where monks built a monastery in the 6th century, reached by about 600 stone steps cut into the slope. Boats land only in calm weather, and the season is short.
Newgrange appears here as well, and a Stone Age tomb competes with sea cliffs, a medieval monastery and a capital city.
Eurovision: Ireland and Sweden, seven wins each
Ireland and Sweden share the Eurovision record with seven wins each, and Sweden drew level only in 2023.2 Ireland won in 1970, 1980, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996. The run from 1992 to 1994 is still the only time a country has won three contests in a row.
Johnny Logan is the name inside that total. He won as a singer in 1980 and again in 1987, and for 36 years nobody else had done it twice. Sweden's Loreen matched him in 2023, the year Sweden reached seven.
The recent record is Ireland's weak point. Between 2014 and 2025 it reached the final only twice, in 2018 and 2024. It was absent in 2026: RTÉ joined Iceland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain in boycotting the Vienna contest over Israel's participation.3 Bulgaria, the first-time winner in Vienna, is also one of the 25 countries on the list.
A 9,000-year lease and a stout
The best beer country in the world sets Ireland against Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium and eleven others. Belgium's beer culture has been on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage since 2016, and Germany brings the purity law of 1516.
Ireland's entry rests on one Dublin brewery. Arthur Guinness was 34 when he signed a 9,000-year lease on a disused four-acre brewery at St. James's Gate on 31 December 1759, at £45 a year.4
The harp on the label outgrew the lease. When the Irish Free State adopted the same harp as its emblem in 1922, the state's version had to face the other way to avoid infringing the Guinness trademark.4
The case against Ireland is range. A country famous for one stout faces countries that brew hundreds of styles.
Halloween vs St. Patrick's Day: two holidays with Irish roots
The best holiday of the year is an 18-option ranking built largely on the American calendar: Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Super Bowl Sunday. Two of its options came from Ireland.
St. Patrick's Day is the obvious one. It began as a feast day for Ireland's patron saint, and the parades, the green beer and the Chicago River dyed green every March were added in America.
Halloween is the less obvious one. It grew out of Samhain, the Gaelic festival that marked the end of the harvest on the night of October 31, and Irish emigrants carried its customs to the United States in the 19th century.
Both of them face Christmas in the same field.
The list U2 would rather not top
No band wants to come first on a list of overrated acts, and U2 are on this one, alongside the Beatles, Coldplay, Nickelback and twelve others.
The case against them has a date. In September 2014 Apple placed U2's album Songs of Innocence in the libraries of hundreds of millions of iTunes users, wanted or not, and Bono later apologised for it.
The case for them is the catalogue. Four friends who met at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin in 1976 made The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby and became one of the biggest live acts in the world.
The Dubliners vs Simon & Garfunkel: folk from a pub on Merrion Row
The best folk band of all time is a 38-option ranking, and six of its bands come out of Irish music: The Dubliners, The Pogues, The Chieftains, Clannad, Altan and De Dannan.
The Dubliners started in 1962 in O'Donoghue's pub on Merrion Row in Dublin. Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew gave them two voices nobody could mistake, and "Seven Drunken Nights" took them into the British top ten in 1967.
The Pogues bring a different Irish case: a band formed in London in 1982 by the children of Irish emigrants, playing the same tunes faster and louder.
Simon & Garfunkel stand for the American tradition, where folk meant new songs written by the singers. Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio belong to the same side of the list.
Katie Taylor vs Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden
Katie Taylor of Bray, County Wicklow, is one of 17 fighters on the list of the greatest female boxers, alongside Claressa Shields, Laila Ali, Lucia Rijker and Christy Martin.
Taylor won Olympic lightweight gold in London in 2012, the first Games to include women's boxing.
Her biggest night came on April 30, 2022. She and Amanda Serrano became the first women to headline a boxing card at Madison Square Garden, and Taylor kept her undisputed lightweight titles on a split decision.5
Serrano has a strong claim of her own. The Puerto Rican is a seven-division world champion, and she moved up two weight classes for that fight.
Conor McGregor's two belts
The best UFC lightweight champion of all time is a 14-man list of champions at 155 pounds, Jens Pulver and Ilia Topuria among them. Conor McGregor of Crumlin, Dublin, took it on November 12, 2016, at UFC 205, the promotion's first event at Madison Square Garden.
He stopped Eddie Alvarez in the second round. With the featherweight belt already his, McGregor became the first fighter to hold two UFC titles at the same time.6
He never defended the lightweight one. Khabib Nurmagomedov won the vacant belt in 2018, submitted McGregor at UFC 229 that October and retired unbeaten at 29-0, which gives the list its best case against the Irishman.
Roy Keane among 52 Premier League greats
The ranking of the greatest Premier League players holds 52 names, the largest field in this set, and Roy Keane from Cork is one of them. He lifted the trophy seven times in 12 seasons at Manchester United and entered the league's Hall of Fame in May 2021, after Alan Shearer, Thierry Henry and Eric Cantona.7
Patrick Vieira is the pairing that fans of that era remember. The two captains met in title races between United and Arsenal for years, the Highbury tunnel row of 2005 included.
A defensive midfielder starts as an outsider in a field that also holds Cristiano Ronaldo and Kevin De Bruyne.
A James Bond from Drogheda
Six actors have played James Bond in the official films, and the ranking holds all six. Pierce Brosnan, born in Drogheda, County Louth, in 1953, played him four times, from GoldenEye in 1995 to Die Another Day in 2002. Drogheda is a short drive from Newgrange.
Sean Connery set the standard. Brosnan's case is GoldenEye, which restarted the series after a six-year gap.
Ulysses vs The Great Gatsby: one Dublin day against Long Island
James Joyce's Ulysses came out in Paris on 2 February 1922, his 40th birthday, published by Sylvia Beach of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company. The whole novel takes place in Dublin on 16 June 1904, a date the city now marks every year as Bloomsday.
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is the American rival: shorter, a staple of US high-school reading lists, and far quicker to read than Joyce's 265,000 words.
The ranking of the best novel of the 1920s also holds Mrs Dalloway, set on a single June day in London, plus The Sound and the Fury and The Magic Mountain. Ulysses competes with books that took its experiments in their own directions.
Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and the Dublin vampire
The 14 greatest horror writers include two born in Dublin. Bram Stoker, born in Clontarf in 1847, published Dracula in 1897. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote Carmilla, a vampire novella that appeared 25 years earlier.
Stephen King is the living giant on the list, and Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and H. P. Lovecraft are the founders.
Stoker's case is narrow and very hard to knock down. Every screen Dracula, from Nosferatu in 1922 to Francis Ford Coppola's film in 1992, goes back to one book by a former Dublin Castle civil servant who spent 27 years as business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London.
Newgrange vs Maeshowe: sunrise against sunset
The best ancient site to watch the solstice holds 17 places, and two of them are in Ireland: Newgrange in County Meath and the Drombeg stone circle in West Cork.
Newgrange's design is the reason it belongs here. A roof-box above the entrance lets the rising sun run along the passage to the chamber on the mornings around December 21. The archaeologist Michael O'Kelly, who excavated the tomb, saw it happen on 21 December 1967, the first person known to have done so in modern times.
UNESCO listed the Brú na Bóinne complex, with Knowth and Dowth, in 1993 and describes it as Europe's largest concentration of prehistoric megalithic art.8
Maeshowe on Orkney works the other way round: the setting sun lights its chamber for weeks around midwinter. Drombeg also faces the winter sunset, while Stonehenge, Machu Picchu and Chankillo in Peru bring alignments from other continents and other months.
Hill of Tara: the stone that roared
Which ancient monument has the best legend is a ranking of 19 stories attached to stones, tombs and walls. Ireland has two entries: the Hill of Tara and Newgrange, both in County Meath.
Tara was the seat of the high kings of Ireland. Its coronation stone, the Lia Fáil, is one of the four legendary treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, according to the Office of Public Works,9 and tradition says it cried out when the rightful king stood on it.
In Irish myth Newgrange was the house of the Dagda, chief of the same gods, until his son Aengus won it from him by a trick.
Stonehenge has the rival story with an Irish twist. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote around 1136 that Merlin brought its stones over from Ireland.
Irish Coffee vs Espresso: a drink for one delayed flight
The best coffee drink is a 31-option ranking of espresso drinks and brewing methods, and Irish Coffee is the only one built around whiskey.
It was first made at Foynes, on the Shannon estuary in County Limerick, in the winter of 1943. A New York-bound flight turned back after hours in bad weather, and the chef Joe Sheridan added Irish whiskey to the coffee for the cold passengers. Asked whether he had used Brazilian coffee, he answered: "no, that was Irish Coffee!"10
Espresso is the purist's choice, and most of the list is built on it. Irish Coffee is closer to a cocktail, served in a stemmed glass after dinner.
Small rooms, large fields
Several of these entries began in rooms that hold a few dozen people: a chamber lit for minutes a year, a pub on Merrion Row, a terminal restaurant at Foynes, one Dublin day in a novel. On the lists above they meet Italy, Stephen King, Coldplay and Christmas.
Each of these rankings is put together from single matchups between two options. That method puts a stone circle in Cork in the same matchups as Machu Picchu.
If your county or your family has its own candidate for a list like these, build the ranking and see who agrees.
More rankings, more angles
- Stonehenge vs the Pyramids: Which Is Older? 12 Lists Where They Meet — a ditch older than the Great Pyramid
- What Is Ukraine Famous For? Borscht, Bubka and Carol of the Bells on 15 Lists — another Eurovision country, from borscht to opera houses
- Best Place to Visit in Europe? Italy Across 15 Lists — wine regions, carnivals and a missed World Cup
Sources
- Drogheda Life — Newgrange Winter Solstice lottery 2026: 38 winners from 34,263 entries, drawn by pupils of three local schools: droghedalife.com (checked 2026-11-10)
- Wikipedia — Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest: seven wins and their years, the only three consecutive wins, the record shared with Sweden since 2023, finals reached 2014–2025: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-11-10)
- Wikipedia — Eurovision Song Contest 2026: Bulgaria's win, the boycott by Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-11-10)
- Guinness Storehouse — The story of Guinness: the 9,000-year lease of 31 December 1759 at £45 a year, and the Free State harp facing the other way: guinness-storehouse.com (checked 2026-11-10)
- CBC Sports / The Associated Press — Taylor tops Serrano in first women's boxing match to headline Madison Square Garden: cbc.ca (checked 2026-11-10)
- Sports Illustrated — UFC 205: McGregor stops Alvarez to become the first UFC fighter to hold two titles at once: si.com (checked 2026-11-10)
- Premier League — Keane voted into the Premier League Hall of Fame, 18 May 2021: premierleague.com (checked 2026-11-10)
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Brú na Bóinne, Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne, inscribed 1993: whc.unesco.org (checked 2026-11-10)
- Heritage Ireland (Office of Public Works) — Hill of Tara and the Lia Fáil: heritageireland.ie (checked 2026-11-10)
- Foynes Flying Boat & Maritime Museum — The origin of Irish Coffee, winter 1943: flyingboatmuseum.com (checked 2026-11-10)