Lucky lotto town brings home the jackpot again

WINNING SMILES Lorraine O’Connor, owner of Carey’s Newsagent (centre), and her daughter Molly, are pictured with all the staff of the store where the €14 million lotto ticket was sold last Friday. Pic: Paul Mealey

Carey’s Newsagent’s in Belmullet has sold winning tickets several times

Áine Ryan

ERRIS may be the best place to go wild in the country, according to an Irish Times competition in 2014,  but Belmullet is now the luckiest Lotto town after last weekend’s whopping €13.7 million win by a mystery purchaser, who by all accounts is  most likely a local.
That is according to Lorraine  O’Connor, the owner of Carey’s Newsagent’s and Bookshop on Main Street, who, when not pouring champagne for her ecstatic staff, when The Mayo News visited on Sunday afternoon was fielding questions from members of the media.  
While Lorraine left those ceisteanna as gaeilge to her 13-year-old son, Billy,  she confided that ‘beer rather than bubbly was more the usual tipple of choice but in the circumstances the champagne seemed more appropriate’.
“I wasn’t on the till myself on Saturday afternoon but I was in and out during the day. We know it was a €10 four-line Quick Pick, which are a very common purchase on a Saturday. My hunch is that it is a local as there were no wed- dings in the area and since it is January there weren’t many visitors around,” Lorraine said.

Previous successes
“We had a €500,000 win in the Euro Millions Lottery last August and two years ago a customer won €350,000 on Lotto Plus. Over the years we’ve had six or seven big wins and the first was was back in 1987,” she continued.
Coincidentally, both her aunt and uncle run shops in Loughrea, Co Galway and Lucan, Co Dublin, and they have had 15 or 16 wins between them all. Lorraine purchased the shop from her father three years ago. It has been in family ownership since the early 1980s.
 She said that when she received the call on Saturday night from the local National Lottery  representative, Padraig Gillespie, she told him she would have to phone him back as she was so shocked she needed to sit down.
“When it sank in and I had let my family know, I texted our ten staff in a group message. We had all been out the night before for a staff party and they thought I was winding them up,” Lorraine said.
It was staff members, Hazel O’Connor and Danielle Ginley who were on duty when the lucky lottery ticket was sold.
“There were so many Quick Picks on Saturday afternoon and they were nearly all locals but we haven’t a clue,” they said.
Among the steady stream of well-wishers braving the stiff southerly winds and mists rolling in from the Atlantic on Sunday was Annette Howard from the nearby Brogan’s Eurospar shop.
“Our biggest win was €11.8 million in the National Lottery three years ago. We are a very lucky town,” Ms Howard said.  
Another friend of Lorraine O’Connor, Sinn Féin county councillor and General Election candidate, Rose Conway-Walsh, had a big smile on her arrival.
When asked if she was the winner and, if not, had she any idea of his or her identity, she said she was surprised that ‘the whole area didn’t know, since everybody usually knows everything about each other in Erris’.
Conway-Walsh added: “But if I happened to be the winner, I would make sure Belmullet got a good hospital.”