Mayo News duo scoop local lottery

Helen Carey and Sean Staunton from The Mayo News with the four numbers that scooped them a cool €20,000 in the Fahy Community Lotto Development Draw on Friday night last.?Pic: Michael McLaughlin

Mayo News duo enjoys a lotto luck


Edwin McGreal

Phonecalls at 1.20am are normally best left alone but Helen Carey had a funny feeling it could be a lucky call when she saw an unknown number pop up on her mobile phone in the early hours of Sunday morning.
“I bet it’s to tell me we’ve won the Fahy lotto,” she thought at the time. She wasn’t wrong. Helen just missed the call but then rang back to find Padraig Lawless from the Fahy Community Lotto Committee on the other line. Padraig had the pleasure of telling Helen that she and her Mayo News colleague SeΡn Staunton had just scooped the €20,000 jackpot.
“Usually when you get a call at that time of the morning, you let it ring out,” admitted the Mayo News sales executive. “The fact that it wasn’t someone in my phone book thankfully ruled out bad news and then I just thought maybe it was the Fahy lotto. I missed the call but I couldn’t not ring back with that thought in my head so I rang back and got the great news.”
From there Helen rang her lotto partner, former Mayo News editor SeΡn Staunton to relay the good news. “Helen rang me and woke me up from a sound sleep and I wasn’t thanking her at the time and I thought that someone was having her on but she insisted that she had got the call from Padraig Lawless and it sank in then. I didn’t settle back into a sound sleep too quickly,” admitted SeΡn, who now works as a part-time proofreader with The Mayo News.
So how will they spend their winnings?
SeΡn Staunton admits he is looking forward to disbursing his share of the winnings amongst his family while the money will come in handy for Helen Carey’s upcoming holiday to Portugal, not to mind her return to college following that.
It is SeΡn who can take the credit for picking the winning numbers. The pair had been jointly playing the Fahy Community Lotto for the past seven weeks as it started to climb towards the maximum allowed, €20,000. Helen had been picking the numbers initially but after no success, she asked SeΡn to pick the numbers last Monday and the lucky four numbers were 2, 12, 20 and 32.