Lottery winners - Anyone you know?

Does anyone know anyone who won anything substantial on either lottery tickets or the Lotto itself? Maybe when the Lottery tickets were first launched there might have been some big winners to kick-start the mania but I'd say it must be a very rare event now.
As an aside, I was at the launch of the Lottery card in the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, would have been in the late eighties. I was standing a few feet away from Charles Haughey, with Ray Burke standing beside him. (I remember being surprised at the time at how small in stature they were!). Anyway, Charlie released a huge net of baloons into the air. Some of the baloons had lottery tickets taped onto them so there was a "grushy" among the crowd to find them. I got a few of them. You would then post them off and have a small bottle of wine for each card sent to your house a couple of weeks later.
Getting back to the point, I have never heard of anyone winning more than a fiver on a lottery ticket BUT I did know someone who won over a million pounds on the Lotto, and that was when a million pounds was a million pounds, probably equivalent to around three million euros now. Before his big win he was a work colleague of mine and we were good friends inside and outside of work. Later, we went to separate jobs and gradually lost regular contact.
I was amazed then to see him years later with his wife on the Six o'Clock news being presented with the big cheque. It was almost surreal. He was asked what he was going to do with the money and he was so excited all he could think of saying was something like, "I don't know, I'm all confused!" After the clip was shown the news-reader, Anne Doyle, said, "well, that's a nice kind of confusion".
I was really happy for them because they were a lovely family. The ironic thing about it is that he was a whizz at maths and he used to give private grinds to students studying calculus. But the winning numbers he chose were simply based on his kid's birthdays!
I rang them a couple of weeks later to congratulate them. I spoke to his wife who was very calm about it at that stage and she was saying that they weren't going to go mad with it, that they wanted to give the kids a good education. I never got to speak to my ex-colleague, he had just left a few minutes earlier.