Two Ticket Holders Split €4.5 Million Irish Lotto Jackpot
Two players matched all six main numbers in the Irish Lotto draw on Saturday 1st October to split a jackpot of €4.5 million. One of the tickets was sold in Co Kerry and the other in Co Donegal, and both winners can now celebrate becoming €2.26 million richer after a run of five rollovers was brought to an end.
Both winning tickets were Quick Picks, but the two stores which sold the all-important entries have quite different histories when it comes to the number of Lotto success stories each has produced. This is the ‘third big one’ in recent years for the Centra Food Market in Carrigart, Co. Donegal, according to manager Shaun Boyce. He said in the Irish Mirror: “We had a winner seven or eight years ago and another one two years ago, it was a New Year’s Millionaire Lotto and she won one million.”
Hannah Mary’s County Store XL in Killorglin, Co. Kerry, by contrast, has only had a lottery machine for 18 months and serves a small community. Asked about who might have bought the winning ticket, owner Jerome Griffin said: “I’ve no idea at all. I would be thinking that it is going to be a local because a lot of our customers would be local.”
The winning numbers for Saturday night’s draw were 2, 5, 8, 14, 40 and 42 with Bonus Ball 7, and you can find a full prize breakdown in the Irish Lotto Results section, as well as lots of information about recent draws. The jackpot had not been won since Saturday 10th September, when there were also two winning tickets which shared a top prize of €4.6 million.
A family syndicate from Westmeath quickly claimed one of the prizes from that draw, and another group of brothers and sisters from Dublin has now picked up the other cheque for €2.3 million from National Lottery headquarters. The lucky players have decided to keep their identities hidden, but have revealed that they plan to embark on a family holiday to the Caribbean after Christmas.
“We only checked our tickets after we heard about the other winning family syndicate from Westmeath and we realised there was another winning ticket from Dublin,” said a spokeswoman for the group, quoted in The Journal. “Since we checked our numbers, we haven’t had any sleep with the excitement.”
The Irish Lotto jackpot will reset to €2 million for the next draw on Wednesday night, and you can buy tickets by either playing online or popping down to an authorised retailer in Ireland. You might even be inspired by the stories of the winning family syndicates to play in a group,
3rd October 2016
