SEAMUS DUFFY spent most of last Saturday evening sitting in his rented home filling out his forms for sickness benefits. Yesterday he collected £4,593,096 as the outright winner of last Saturday night’s British National Lottery jackpot.
“I watched a late-night movie and at two o’clock on Sunday morning I decided to check my lucky dip numbers. I couldn’t believe what I saw on the screen.
“I ran upstairs and got my fiancee Carmel out of bed to make sure I was seeing right and ever since I’ve been living in a daze, still not realising the reality of what has happened,” he said.
Mr Duffy (49) had to give up his job as a building site digger driver last year because of problems with arthritis in his upper body. “It’s been a tough time and a lot of people stood by me during that tough time and now I’ll be able to stand by them. My fiancee, Carmel Rogers from Derry, my parents Eugene and Mattie and all of my friends who stood by me during those times, now I can do something for them.
“My mother and father celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last month and tomorrow is my mother’s 68th birthday. My father’s health is not good at the moment and it’s just great to have them here today for this,” he said.
As he became emotionally upset while talking about his parents, Mr Duffy said he had at times had to return to his parents’ home in the Co Derry village of Greysteel because “I hadn’t a roof over my head”. A father of six children, whose ages range from their late teens to 27 from two previous relationships, Mr Duffy said he looked forward to replacing his “old banger with a top-of-the-range Range Rover” and when the fuss died down he and Ms Rogers would start house-hunting.
One of five brothers and three sisters, he said he was going to tear up his sickness benefits application form “because I don’t need it now”.
Because of his arthritis, Northern Ireland’s latest lottery millionaire struggled to hold the cardboard cheque shoulder high for photographers when he and Ms Rogers posed for the cameras at the Drummond Hotel in Ballykelly yesterday morning.
“I never expected to be twisting my neck so much in the one day looking from one camera to another,” he laughed.
After soaking his fiancee in champagne, Mr Duffy said he had recently won £88 in a lottery draw.
“I thought if I won fifty or one hundred grand that I would be delighted. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect this but now it puts me in a position to help people who stood by me during the thick and thin times,” he said.