'I became £10m richer after lottery win but dark consequence emerged after trip'
'I became £10m richer after lottery win but dark consequence emerged after holiday'
Peter Lavery won £10.2million on the lottery in 1996 and spent £3million in just four weeks - but he got a surprise after coming home from a celebratory holiday
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Add us as preferred source Comments By Liam McInerney 13:23, Thu, Jul 2, 2026 Updated: 13:23, Thu, Jul 2, 2026 
A man who secured an extraordinary £10.2million on the lottery in 1996 encountered a troubling reality immediately upon returning to Belfast — after a celebratory getaway with his loved ones.
Peter Lavery was 34 at the time of his windfall and he was out for an evening with friends when someone informed him he had claimed the jackpot.
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Nevertheless, too intoxicated to recall clearly, it wasn't until the following morning he understood his circumstances had transformed permanently after verifying his numbers. In a new interview, he recalled: "It felt unreal."
And when asked on the In Good Company podcast whether he instantly had plans regarding what to do with the enormous sum, he said: "Put it this way, in the first four weeks, I spent £3million giving it away to my family and charities."
Following the discovery on Sunday morning, he then completed a five-hour shift as a bus driver, where he collected £200 a week, but by Wednesday, he had resigned from his position and was at a five-star destination in the Caribbean.
He said: "12 members, between friends and family, came with me to St Lucia. My first trip to St Lucia cost £66,000. It was all flying out club class, you name it, it was the best resort in the centre of St Lucia."
Peter said he awoke on holiday each morning struggling to comprehend what had occurred — and he said it felt like a dream.
Yet the lottery winner, who was raised in the working class neighbourhood of Short Strand, found it became rather nightmarish when he arrived back in Belfast from holiday. By that point, he had become the focus of intense media attention, with seemingly the entire city aware of his newfound wealth.
When asked whether people had approached him requesting money, he revealed: "I've had that. I got back to Belfast after my three-and-a-half weeks away. The head of the post office came to my door right, and he goes, 'We have 15,000 letters in the exchange for you, what do you want me to do with them?'"
Completely inundated, Peter requested the letters be sent back to their originators, noting that most lacked his proper address, with envelopes simply addressed to: "Peter Lavery lottery winner."
He acknowledged some correspondence did reach his home, and when questioned about whether any caught his attention, Peter added: "They do, but where do you start and where do you finish?
"People who come, they're in desperate situations to do so, like they must be so desperate to think you are the answer."
He continued: "Listen, you can only do what you can do, and sometimes you give an organisation £1,000 and they turn and say 'you may as well give us two' so as long as my heart tells you I've done something... I didn't have to do anything.
"And if you don't get that in your head, then you put your own head away too."
Despite spending a portion of his winnings, Peter is now recognised as an accomplished entrepreneur and is the founder of Titanic Distillers. However, having initially become one of the wealthiest men in Northern Ireland overnight, he revealed in a previous interview that it represented the "biggest upheaval" of his life.
He indulged excessively in food, alcohol and partying, and after purchasing a family home for his siblings, he splashed out £300,000 to reside in the prestigious 'Golden Triangle' area.
Within the first two years, he also squandered half a million on vehicles, including Jaguars and Bentleys. He subsequently sold his luxury cars, though he retained his Mercedes.
The reality of being a lottery winner eventually began to affect his wellbeing, and as he approached his 40th birthday, he reached breaking point.
He recognised that his drinking would prove fatal if left unchecked, and was subsequently diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes.
Speaking in 2023 for a BBC documentary, he said: "I didn't drink every day but once I got a drink in me I just didn't want to go home so I would be out in Belfast until four or five in the morning. It's nothing to be proud of.
"I didn't have liver or heart problems but my sugar levels were going in the wrong direction and my doctor, who's a good friend of mine, told me to change my lifestyle or I'd be injecting insulin forever."
Peter, who no longer drinks, has earned a reputation for his charitable nature over the years, donating almost £2million to various good causes. He also famously treated 20 youngsters affected by the Troubles and their parents to a trip to Disney World in Florida as a gesture of goodwill.
AI boom blows up Big Tech’s climate promises
Google logo on a building in New York. (Gene J. Puskar / Associated Press) - Share via
The greenhouse gas emissions of Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google spiked in 2025, pointing to a growing problem for the hyperscalers: reconciling their climate goals with the massive amount of energy required to power AI, much of it still generated from fossil fuels.
Amazon’s emissions rose 16% from 2024, the company said in a sustainability report released Wednesday. It emitted about 81 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, roughly as much as the emissions from 19 million gas-powered cars on the road. The increase was driven by data center construction and fuel used for deliveries, the report said.
Google’s “ambition-based” emissions — a definition that excludes some parts of its supply chain — climbed 18% overall in 2025. Its Scope 1 emissions from its own operations, excluding purchased electricity, went up 20% compared to 2024, due in part to its expanding data center portfolio, the company said in its own sustainability report released Tuesday.
Amazon has a goal of reaching net zero by 2040, while Google is targeting 2030. As they balance AI’s power needs with sustainability, the companies report varying degrees of success.
Google’s electricity use went up by 37% last year, but it managed a small drop in its Scope 2 emissions from purchased power due to its sourcing of clean energy. Amazon, by contrast, said its emissions from buying electricity rose 34%.
Other tech giants are reckoning with the same challenge. Microsoft Corp. pledged to match 100% of its hourly electricity consumption with purchases of zero-carbon energy by 2030. Bloomberg News reported earlier this year that the company has weighed scaling back the commitment because of data center expansion.
Microsoft and Meta Platforms Inc., in their most recent reports published last year, cited emissions jumps of 23% and 64%, respectively. Meta set a net-zero target for 2030 across its entire value chain.
Data centers’ hunger for power is helping drive up utility bills and spurring investment in US fossil fuel infrastructure, including natural gas power plants. SpaceX is using gas turbines to run its AI data centers in Tennessee and Mississippi.
But producing the hardware, concrete and steel used in the facilities is also energy intensive. Google, in its new report, reported a 25% rise in Scope 3 or supply-chain emissions from 2024 that it attributed mostly to hardware manufacturing and data center construction.
Critics argue the industry should be doing more to curb its carbon footprint.
“We’re essentially in a climate crisis and we should not be having emissions growth at all, arguably, and yet the data centers are going in the opposite direction,” said Sasha Luccioni, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Sustainable AI Group, which works to measure and limit the environmental impact of the sector.
Amazon and Google both said they remain committed to their sustainability targets. Google’s report noted that its path to net zero will not be linear, “given our AI infrastructure build-out is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing.”
“While the speed and scale of AI adoption is unique — and the change is happening faster and more broadly than anything else we’ve encountered in our lifetimes — the need to stay stubborn on our vision and flexible on the details is familiar territory,” Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst said in its report.
This spring, activist investors asked Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in shareholder proposals to explain how they’re reconciling surging electricity demand for AI with their climate commitments. None of the proposals earned majority support.
Raimonde and Soper write for Bloomberg.
