Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Happy days are here ...AGAIN!
Lucky Ulster couple’s Lotto £1m two years after scooping £20k
A LUCKY Lotto couple haved defied the odds to win £1million just two years after scooping £20,000.
Catherine and Ciaran Kidd, from Co Derry, could not believe it when they landed the Euromillions prize – 50 times their previous win.
The couple, who have four children, thought their luck was done when they won £20,000 in the Lotto Millionaire.
But they are celebrating after getting £1million in the Euromillions UK Millionaire Maker draw on Tuesday, November 7.
Catherine, 38, from Draperstown, said: “We really can’t believe this. It still hasn’t sunk in. We were lucky enough to win £20,000 in the Lotto Millionaire Raffle almost two years ago to the day and that made such a big difference to our lives back then, paying off our car and taking us on holiday. Now we’ve won a million pounds and we really haven’t a clue what we’re going to do with it just yet.”
Catherine, who works for a youth development programme that helps 16 to 25-year-olds find employment, said she plays the Euromillions and Lotto online.
She added: “The great thing about playing online is you always receive an email to tell you if you’ve won anything so I was in work on the Wednesday after the draw when the email came through. I wasn’t able to check on my computer at work so I phoned Ciaran and asked him to check – as I couldn’t settle with the suspense until I found out.
“After a few minutes, he called me back and said I must have given him the wrong details as the system was showing we’d won a million pounds.
“He thought I was winding him up, and I thought he was winding me up, but then he sent a screenshot to my phone and it all went a bit crazy after that. “I thought my heart was going to burst as I sat in work for the rest of the day – trying to control my emotions and asking myself if this was really happening. “When I got home, Ciaran and I just stared at each other as if to say ‘can you believe this is happening’ and gave each other a big hug. It was, and still is, totally surreal.”
The family are looking forward to an extra special Christmas but said they had no plans on how to spend the money at this stage. Ciaran, 40, a machinist at Moyola Precision Engineering, said: “We are still pinching ourselves to make sure this is true. “We’re very normal down-to-earth people who have been lucky to experience something that is far from normal and we feel very privileged.”
CO DERRY YESTERDAY