The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, stumbled across the lucrative ticket while sorting through a pile of paperwork, a duty bestowed on him by his wife. The prize, which dated back to the draw on Friday 15th April, came as a shocking, yet very pleasant surprise to the couple: "I’m absolutely thrilled. I was cleaning up a pile of old Lottery tickets and I just started checking them on the National Lottery App on my phone,” the man told the Irish Examiner. "When I saw that I had won the EuroMillions Plus draw, I had to keep scanning my tickets on the phone app with my wife to make sure we had won.”
The winning ticket was a Quick Pick purchased at Jones’ Deli in Ballsbridge on the day of the draw. The delighted Dubliner has already laid out plans for the fortune, insisting it will be used to benefit his family: "We are going to pay off our mortgage first and foremost while the rest of the money will be put towards our children’s education over the next number of years." For now, though, the realisation still seems to be setting: “It’s hard to imagine that I had a €500,000 winning ticket rolled up into a ball on my floor for three weeks!”
Thanks to his wife’s insistence that the tidying should be done, the man avoided the painful possibility that he would miss the deadline to collect his prize. Ticket holders are reminded that all EuroMillions prizes won in Ireland must be claimed within 90 days of the draw, a fact that could see plenty of tidy households across the country in the coming days. Visit the Rules page to learn more about the deadlines for claiming EuroMillions prizes in each of the participating countries.
This Friday’s EuroMillions jackpot is a guaranteed £11 million (€15 million) and there are also a whole host of supplementary games to take part in, including Ireland’s EuroMillions Plus, the UK’s Millionaire Maker, France’s My Millions, Switzerland’s Super-Star, and a number of Joker and Joker + games in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria and Portugal. To be in with a chance of winning these fantastic prizes, tickets can be purchased online or from authorised retailers in participating countries. Stay lucky!