Midlands couple celebrate as lost ticket yields €500,000 lottery win

A farming couple from the Midlands are celebrating a Euromillions €500,000 win after checking the numbers of a ticket discarded among waste paper in their car.

The ticket was found by a woman searching for coins for a parking metre and who then decided to check the numbers. She explained “I spotted four Lottery tickets stuffed with rubbish in the side pocket of the driver’s door.

"I thought I better bring them into the shop to get them scanned, just in case. I could not believe my luck when I was told to ring the National Lottery office that I had won a significant amount!”

When she did check with the National Lottery, she found out the ticket was worth €500,000. The ticket was purchased at a service station in Co Laois in April and would have expired in July.

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The woman who found the ticket said her family was “terrible for forgetting about the tickets and not checking the numbers.”

“We usually let them accumulate before getting them checked together. If I wasn’t hunting for loose change in the car we might have forgotten about these tickets and it might have been too late to claim,” she said.

The couple, who have a young family, have decided not to go public with their win and have not yet told members of their extended family.

The couple plan to spend their winnings paying off their mortgage and on a holiday.

“We are farmers and it is a hard graft. Like so many people we have had a tough time financially in recent years so this is a great win and will take the pressure off.”

Separately, two Carlow binmen claimed €220,000 on Friday after buying a lottery ticket on the “spur of the moment” last Thursday.