Guessinggame continuesasjackpot notyetclaimed

September 2005

THE guessing game - that’s been the favourite pastime on the streets of Bray this week as the town’s residents tried to pinpoint just who has their hands on magic Lotto ticket worth €7.4 million.

And even games have victims, as Oldcourt couple Danny and Cathy O’Brien found to their cost at the weekend, when they found themselves stalked by media reporters and photographers, who believed them to be the latest Lotto millionaires.

Insisting that they are not the winners of the jackpot, Danny and Cathy were baffled to find photographers following them around the town and reporters knocking on their door over the weekend.

The rumour was in fact started by Danny friend Liam McDonagh, who told a Sunday newspaper that he had started it as a prank to repay Danny after he didn’t give him a lift in his car during the week and left him in the rain.

While seeing the funny side to start with, following a week of being chased paparazzi style by tabloid photographers and being hounded while out and about around Bray, Danny and Cathy had begun to see the whole affair as a ‘cruel joke’ while Danny, who found a photographer snapping away as he joined his son at a football training session near his home, claimed he was losing friends as a result of the gossip.

‘At first I didn’t mind,’ said Cathy this week. ‘But after a while it began to seem like a cruel joke. We are still getting calls from all our family, to see if it’s true and Danny was followed all over the town at the weekend.’

Reporters even doorstepped neighbours on Oldcourt Avenue where the O’Briens live, wondering if Danny and Cathy had been picked up in a helicopter seen circling overhead.

‘I’ve just been to the doctors, and I could see people in the waiting room whispering about me!’ said Cathy, who added that her children had been plagued by questions from inquisitive locals all weekend.

She insists that herself and Danny aren’t the lucky couple.