Lotto winner picks up €5.3m cheque at National Lottery HQ

A MUNSTER woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, has described how she only discovered she had won the Lotto late last Sunday after her broadband service resumed after an all-day outage in her area and had to check the numbers about 50 times before she could confirm it.

Sitting in the National Lottery Winner’s Room today, the elated winner revealed how she learned of her life-changing €5,325,592 Lotto jackpot prize.

'I normally check my tickets on the app or online pretty soon after the draw but I couldn’t get a broadband connection all day. It’s only when a WhatsApp message finally came through from a relative later that night that I discovered the broadband was back working and the Lotto had been won,' she said.

'That prompted me to check the ticket and I was gobsmacked when I saw the numbers match one of the panels on the ticket. I checked about 50 times that I didn’t make a mistake or that the dates were incorrect. I said to my husband ‘I think we won the Lotto’ and he didn’t even look up from the newspaper he was reading. Finally, he checked the ticket and low and behold, we haven’t had a wink of sleep since! '

'Who knows, if I never got that WhatsApp message maybe I still wouldn’t have discovered that I won the Lotto”' 

The woman celebrated picking up her cheque over a cup of tea and said that she and her family have no immediate plans for their windfall but will clear off their mortgage.

'We’ll clear the mortgage for sure and after that, we’ll see what happens. We’re just going to take our time and let this news sink in. To be honest we are still pinching ourselves to see if this really is real life! We’ll let the dust settle and maybe take a holiday over the coming months before we make any other spending decisions.'

She purchased her winning Lotto Quick Pick ticket at the Centra store in Innishannon owned by Barry O'Sullivan who is splitting the €15,000 commission that the store is receiving for selling the winning ticket among all his staff.