WE PAT AND FRANCES
AS £115m COUPLE VOW TO GIVE AWAY LOTTO MILLIONS.. JUST CUT OUT THIS PAGE & STICK IT IN YOUR WINDOW
BRITAIN’S newest lottery millionaires Pat and Frances Connolly were unveiled yesterday – and vowed to give away huge chunks of their £115million fortune to pals. Here’s your chance to show how much you love them!
THE couple who won the £115million Euro-Millions jackpot have pledged to give a lot of it away.
Frances and Patrick Connolly will dish out millions of pounds to 50 of their close friends and family.
They vowed that they have “no intentions of keeping all that money” for themselves.
But mum-of-three Frances, 52, said the couple from the small town of Moira in Co Armagh would be treating themselves to luxury sports cars and mega-holidays.
She said it will be “a lot of fun” to see the looks on her family and friends’ faces when they hand out the life-changing gifts. She said: “This is a massive sum of money and we want it to have a huge impact on the lives of other people we know and love as well as on our future too.”
The couple became the fourth biggest Lotto winners in UK history when they won the New Year’s Day draw with a last-minute lucky dip ticket.
But when Patrick, 54, logged into their lottery account and realised what had happened the pair simply “sat and stared at each other for 10 minutes” before celebrating with “a hug and a cup of tea”. He said: “We really didn’t know what to do or how to react and we didn’t sleep a wink that night. We rang Camelot at 8am in the morning to verify the win.
“Then it started to dawn on us that it was true even though it still hasn’t really sunk in.”
The pair have also pledged to pour money back into Northern Ireland with Patrick keen to start up a business venture.
They had been planning to move from their rented home to Croydon, south London, where Patrick has been offered a new job.
But he will retire from work while Frances, who worked as an educational programme co-ordinator, will be enrolling in a PhD to study clinical psychology.
Patrick also intends to swap his Renault Laguna estate car for a sporty Alfa Romeo.
The eye-watering win means they could afford to buy 850 average-sized homes in Northern Ireland. The winning numbers were 1, 8, 11, 25, 28 and Lucky Stars 4 and 6.