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Irish Mirror
Irish Mirror
Sport
Oisin Doherty

GAA club has Father Ted moment as chairman bizarrely wins his own club lotto

A chairman of a GAA club has bizarrely won his own clubs lotto. No, this isn't an episode of Father Ted, this actually happened in Galway on Monday night.

John Connolly, Chairman of CLG Bhearna, took home the prize of €10,700. Mr Connolly, a Fianna Fáil councillor, took part in the lotto draw alongside club officers Murt Conneely and Shane O'Flaherty.

And when Cllr Connolly's numbers came out, the chairman was as surprised as anyone to discover that he would be taking home the cash prize.

Cllr Connolly insisted that the result, which was streamed live on Facebook for full transparency, was purely a coincidence. He has been buying club Lotto tickets since the early 1990's proving the old adage true that if you don't buy a ticket, you can't win the raffle.

CLG Bhearna have been in the news already this year for a club lotto draw that took place on April 1st. As an April fools joke, the club drew the numbers of the aforementioned Mr Conneely, before coming clean and revealing that the ruse.

Talk about art imitating life!

As Father Ted Crilly once said moments before he won his own raffle, "The last raffle that I was at was very interesting because the people who ran the raffle actually won it. So, it's not unusual for that to happen now and again."

Maybe we should have listened to Father Ted's pearls of wisdom a little more closely when we had the chance.

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