Tipp accordion player wins €19k on Winning Streak

An accordion player from Co Tipperary won a cool €19,000 when he appeared on the National Lottery Winning Streak TV game show last Saturday (March 7th).
Pat Houlihan from Mullinahone, was delighted with this €19,000 haul from the show and revealed that the week before, he wasn’t watching Winning Streak but later that evening he walked in the front door of his local pub, the Stack of Barley, in Mullinahone, and was met with a loud cheer from locals in the bar. Wondering what all the fuss, and after a bit of disbelief, it soon became apparent that he was going to be on the RTÉ One show.
Getting on Winning Streak was a bittersweet feeling for Pat as it was always the life ambition of his late wife, Margaret, to go on the show. Pat sees this bit of luck as a gift from his late wife,  
Pat occasionally plays traditional Irish music in the local pub and is well known locally to get a decent tune out of the accordion as well as the banjo. He is a decade retired this year having spent much of his working life working for the Tipperary County Council.
It was a stroke of luck how Pat winded up on the show as he was in Carrick-on-Suir last week and was too early to get his lunch in a local restaurant. To kill a bit of time he remembered he had Winning Streak scratch cards with three stars in his wallet so he went into a local shop, got envelopes, filled out the cards and posted them to the National Lottery.
Pat has no firm plans for his winnings just yet as he is going to wait until the dust settles to decide what to do with his Winning Streak windfall.
Winning Streak is on a break next weekend due to the St Patrick’s Day Bank Holiday weekend and will return to RTÉ One on Saturday 21st March.
The Winning Streak National Lottery TV game show is co-presented by Marty Whelan and Sinead Kennedy and features some perennial favourite games including Play or Pay, Roll for Riches, WinFall and Electric Dream – where one player will win an electric car worth €25,000.
As ever one of the lucky five players will get the chance to spin the wheel and win up to €500,000. An exciting element of the show is that one €100,000 segment will be added to the Grand Prize Wheel every show if less than that amount was won in the previous show, improving players chances to win a massive prize.
Winning Streak scratch cards are available in more than 5,800 National Lottery retailers all over the country. In addition to the chance to appear on the Winning Streak TV game show if you get three stars, players will also be in with a chance to win some great cash prizes up to €5,000. The odds of winning a cash prize or a three star prize for those who purchase a Winning Streak scratch card is 1 in 1.86. All players who purchase a scratch card can send their stubs into the National Lottery using grey envelopes, available in all National Lottery agents, where each week on the show, a player will be drawn as the winner of a Luxury Cruise for two valued at €5,000.
Nearly 30 cent in every €1 spent on Winning Streak and all National Lottery games goes back to Good Causes in the areas of sport, youth, health, welfare, education, arts, heritage and the Irish Language. In total more than €5.6 Billion has been raised for Good Causes since the National Lottery was established 32 years ago. In 2019 alone, €250 million was raised for local Good Causes in communities across Ireland.