It can’t be easy to be the recipient of a massive lottery windfall.
You might envy the €12 million beneficiary of Ireland’s latest rollover jackpot - but along with the great privilege of being stinking rich comes that painful quandary of what to spend all that money on.
We thought we’d come up with a few suggestions...
1. As the winner has not yet been identified, we can only speculate as to where their interests lie. But if he/she is a football fan, the princely sum would be just enough to snap up a tidy Premier League defender in the mould of Arsenal’s Alex Song, uncompromising Stoke battleaxe Ryan Shawcross, or England whizzkid John Stones.
2. What if they’re not a football fan? Maybe a dog lover. If so, a nice Tibetan mastiff could be just the ticket. With an ancestral lineage allegedly derived from lions, mastiffs are highly sought after in China in particular, and with as much as €1.5 million being paid for just one puppy recently, the winner could splash out for eight of them - and maybe get a hamster with the loose change.
3. If they’re coffee lover, they could draw inspiration from Texan Andrew Chifari, who hit the headlines recently for ordering a monstrous Sexagintuple Vanilla Bean Mocha Frappuccino. The behemoth drink costs just shy of €50, so our winner could afford to keep caffeinated for 240,000 days, or, in short, the rest of their life.
4. If that doesn’t get you flying high, further inspiration can be gleaned from the National Lottery’s own ads, in which an eccentric millionaire granny purchases her own private jet. We’ve costed the Beechcraft Superking Air at a very affordable €6 million, and if they want to go that bit further, the quarter of a million quid to claim a space on Virgin Galactic’s much-anticipated space flights isn’t much of a stretch further.
5. If they’re feeling hungry, a full steak meal with all the trimmings in a salubrious Dublin restaurant would set them back a modest €90. Indeed, if they’re feeling lonely and are in need of a bit of company, they could invite the entire population of Louth along to eat at that price.
6. Of course, you have to look after your own, meaning the fortunate soul might well throw a few shillings the way of the good folk of Bundoran where the ticket was bought. If feeling particularly generous, they could afford to lavish a bottle of mind-blowingly expensive Chateau Haut-Brion Cru Classe de Graves Premier Grand Cru Classe Appellation Pessac-Leognan Controlee Domaine de Clarence Dillon SA on each of the town’s 2,000 residents, with some funds to spare.
7. Seeing as we’re in a philanthropic mood, the sum could go two-thirds of the way towards funding the belated construction of our National Children’s Hospital - if they ever find a nice patch of land to put it on.
8. Government coffers are always welcoming of a bit of extra income. If our winner has a patriotic streak, they could write about 1/1000th off the national deficit.
9. Chances are they’ll probably want to treat themselves a bit first though. The perennially unrealisable dream of every avid motorist, the Bugatti Veyron would be a relative steal at just €2.5 million. If they’re more inclined towards practicality and reliability, they could pay for a fleet of roughly 24,000 ’01 Peugeot 206s at the current market rate, but it wouldn’t leave a lot of money for petrol.
10. Finally, if they’re a female with a bit of stylistic flair about them, a pair of Borgezie Platinum Cleopatra Stilettos retails at a reasonable €125,000. At that price, they could buy nearly 100 pairs in case the Donegal terrain makes short work of the first few.