£3m Lotto win a Christmas surprise

The biggest Lotto winner of the year collected a cheque for £2,963,809 in Dublin yesterday

The biggest Lotto winner of the year collected a cheque for £2,963,809 in Dublin yesterday. A Limerick woman, she is the 10th biggest winner since the Lotto began. She discovered she had the winning ticket at 4 p.m. on Christmas Day when her brother-in-law called for dinner. He told her the winning ticket was bought in Limerick. She was carving the turkey, but stopped to check her £1.50 ticket against the teletext numbers. "He was sorry he told me, as the Christmas dinner was abandoned and was not served until much later in the day," she said yesterday. In her 50s and with a family, the woman, who wants to keep her anonymity, works in sales. She said yesterday that her working days were over. "I would like to buy a villa in the sun, where we will spend a lot of our time, and we may build a larger house . . . We may buy a new car in early January and I would just love to have the registration number 99 L 2963809 as a reminder of my win," she said.