In 1968 Joe Murphy and Ned O'Shea realised their dream of a first class resort on the famous Banna Beach strand when they
opened the Banna Beach Hotel in July, 1968. The hotel was built at a cost of £80,000. Interestingly, the hotel only had 30
rooms which would barely qualify it as a hotel in today's world. As a dance mecca, the hotel started very slowly hosting
Saturday night dancing every week with the Melotones (we assume a local band). It was hosting local dinner dances and the like
for most of 1968 and 1969. By mid 1970 they had added a midweek dance, but still had the Melotones every Saturday. The reason
for the lack of major bands was that the original ballroom was only large enough to hold several hundred people. In December, 1973,
the hotel announced the opening of the new ballroom which had been extended to now hold up to 1400 dancers.
The new ballroom opened on December 20th to the sounds of Red Hurley, Kelly and the Nevada, the top band in the country at the time.
For the next 10 years, the hotel ran dances regularly with all the big names of the day. When the showband days were
waning, they made the change (as did many hotels in the early 1980's) to a disco/nite club when they refurbished the ballroom
and opened a new club called Waves (see below). Once again, the venue was reborn and they once again updated and changed
things in 1989 when they opened yet another "new" nite club called Tropic. In 2002, the Banna Beach "hotel" more or less
ceased to exist and was rebranded as the Banna Beach Resort, which it remains to this day.