A €1.6 million Lotto jackpot was claimed within 90 minutes of the deadline yesterday, when a Dublin man found the three-month-old winning ticket among a pile of old mail.
The money would have become the second-largest unclaimed prize in the National Lottery's history, had the winners not presented themselves before the head office closed for business at 5.30 p.m.
But the three members of the victorious syndicate turned up in Lower Abbey Street at about 4 p.m., just in time to collect €546,561 each.
The group, two men and a woman, all from Dublin, have requested anonymity. But after handing over their winnings, the director of the National Lottery, Ray Bates, described their reactions as "stunned".
He added: "I was stunned, too. It was a roomful of stunned people. I've been in this business 15 years and I've never seen a jackpot go so close to the wire. It's probably a world record."
Bought in Heffernan's shop in Phibsboro, Dublin, on September 18th, the winning ticket - numbers 4, 6, 18, 31, 39 and 42 - was a "quickpick".
But there was nothing else quick about the syndicate's success story, as the 90-day period for claiming the prize ticked inexorably by.
Not even an extensive advertising campaign by the lottery in recent days had jogged the winners' memories.
The beginnings of a breakthrough only came on Monday afternoon when one of them heard the unclaimed prize mentioned on RTE radio's Ronan Collins Show.
According to the National Lottery, it was "in the back of his head" that the syndicate had bought tickets in Heffernans. But even then he did nothing. It wasn't until yesterday, when he read about the prize again in a newspaper, that it occurred to him they might have won.
"I thought to myself, I must check that ticket now," he told lottery officials yesterday, adding: "I knew exactly where it was, lying on the kitchen table in the middle of a lot of mail. And when I checked it, there were the numbers."
Wrongly believing that the Lottery offices closed at 4 p.m. - it was after 3 p.m. by then - he rang his two colleagues with the news and suggested they meet him in Abbey Street as fast as they could.
The ticket sellers, Martin and Martina Heffernan, were visiting Santa's Kingdom last night, but had to cut short the trip "because we were getting so many phone calls". Mrs Heffernan added: "We're very, very excited."
The record for a late claim is a €2.9 million jackpot won in July 1999 and collected 62 days afterwards.
The largest unclaimed prize was €3.4 million.
