Essay

Winning the lottery

By Mike Dwane

“What would you do if you won the lottery?” It’s a question friends sometimes ask when we are out for drinks. I tell them I don’t indulge in such fantasies and that the lottery is a tax on the stupid.

But I sometimes have a secret punt. And guess what? I once won all of euro27 (about yen3,700), which I immediately spent on a very nice bottle of wine.

I dream of trying a Chateau Margaux one day. But at up to $2,400 (about yen245,000) a bottle for the 2005 vintage, that is not going to happen unless I really strike it rich in the lottery. And what are the chances of that?

I’m sure that’s what a Dublin surgeon thought when he went to pick his numbers a few years ago. He was already wealthy but went on to win the National Lottery not once, not twice but three times! Life’s just not fair!

A story I prefer is that of Margaret Loughrey from a town in Northern Ireland called Strabane. Margaret was 48 and unemployed when she won pound27 million (yen4.64 billion) in the lottery last December.

A couple of days after her astonishing win, Margaret told the BBC: “It’s in my name at the minute. It’s pound27 million. It’s not going to be mine. It’s going to be spread around. No point having pound27 million and being lonely.”

And “spread it around” is exactly what she has been doing since. Margaret intends to keep just pound1 million for herself and to spend the rest improving her home town. She has already given away exactly half of what she won.

And Strabane is a town that could do with some improvement. It was deeply scarred by the political and sectarian conflict that killed around 3,500 people in Northern Ireland between the late 1960s and 1998. We call that period in our history The Troubles. Ireland has a taste for euphemisms by the way. In this country, World War Two was referred to as The Emergency.

Of the thousands of victims of The Troubles, the youngest was a five-month-old baby killed in an IRA car bomb in Strabane. And during this period, Margaret’s home town was reputed to have the highest rate of unemployment in all the developed world.

Ireland is at peace now but Strabane still has too many out of work. And Margaret is determined to use her good fortune to do something about that.

I don’t think that I would be quite as selfless as Margaret if I became an overnight millionaire. But I’d like to think I could do some good. I’d just like to enjoy a couple of bottles of vintage Bordeaux while I’m thinking it over!

宝くじが当たったら…

飲み会でも定番の話題、「もし宝くじが当たったら…？」。当選金の使い道をあれこれ想像するのは楽しいが、北アイルランドに住むある無職の女性は実際に大金を当て、予想外の使い方をした。

The Japan Times ST: September 12, 2014