On a Monday night, a fair number of people in Boyle have the Eire Competitions live draw open on their phone. It looks straightforward from the outside.

Two people, a laptop, a random number generator, a winner. What Camilla McQuaid and Brendan Mullen describe in this episode is everything sitting underneath that, most of which took far longer than either of them expected.

An idea in November 2023

The pair work together, and the idea came out of that. They had both seen online competitions running elsewhere, but there were almost none based in the Republic of Ireland and nothing at all in the west.

“We just saw a niche in the market,” Brendan says.

They gave themselves six months to get from idea to live website. That turned out to be about right on the calendar and nothing like right on the effort.

The part that nearly stopped them

Ask most people what the hard part of starting an online business is and they will say the website. For Camilla and Brendan it was the paperwork before the website.

“We didn’t know what kind of permission we needed, or licence,” Brendan says. “So we had a bit of trouble getting that.”

Camilla is blunter about it. That was the most difficult thing, full stop. Once it was sorted, the website took over as the ongoing job, and it has never really stopped being one. They are still making adjustments to it.

Then came the problem of reach. An online competition business advertises online, which works well until you remember how many people in a town like Boyle are not on social media at all. They put an advert in one of the local papers early on. It did not take off.

Cash is king

The first prize was cash, chosen on the simple logic that nobody needs persuading about money.

“Everybody loves a bit of money to help pay bills or pay for a holiday,” Camilla says.

Cash still outperforms everything else, but the list of what they have given away has grown well beyond it. Phones. Weekend getaways. A Samsung tablet, more than once.

A Ninja air fryer, which turned out to be one of the most popular prizes they have run, on the basis that everyone has an air fryer but not everyone has that one.

A barbecue in summer, a children’s jungle gym that went down better than expected, home heating oil and a coal bundle through the winter, Smyths vouchers coming up to Christmas, and flight vouchers the winner can spend with whichever airline they like.

The bigger packages have included two tickets to Liverpool against Spurs at Anfield with accommodation and cash on top, and a darts package with two nights in London. At Christmas they ran a draw with ten separate winners and made it all cash.

“Everybody loves a bit of money to help pay bills or pay for a holiday.”

Camilla McQuaid, Voices of Boyle

Asking the town what it wants

Choosing prizes sounds like the fun part. Camilla says it is genuinely difficult, because what you think people want and what they will actually buy a ticket for are frequently different things.

So they ask. Friends and family first, who can be relied on to be honest. Then posts and polls put to their Facebook followers, which have thrown up ideas neither of them would have arrived at on their own.

Three hours for one minute

For the first several months of live draws, the camera pointed at the laptop screen and that was that. After Christmas they decided that if people were going to trust them with money, they should probably see their faces.

The transition was not smooth. A one minute promotional video took the two of them roughly three hours to make, which Camilla puts down to the fact that when you can stop and start again, you second guess everything.

The live draws are different. There is no stopping.

“We just hit the Go Live button and it’s three, two, one, and you’re there,” Camilla says. “You just have to start talking.”

“We just hit the Go Live button and it’s three, two, one, and you’re there. You just have to start talking.”

Camilla McQuaid, Voices of Boyle

The phone call

Ask either of them what the best part is and you get the same answer.

“The best part of this is ringing people after,” Brendan says. “Their reaction is just brilliant.”

He talks about people who were having a bad day when the phone rang, and how the day turns around in the space of a sentence. Camilla calls it the warm fuzzy feeling. Given how much bad news generally arrives by phone, it is a decent thing to be on the other end of.

The calls have gone further than they thought they would. Followers now come from across the country, and one Monday they rang a winner in Kerry, which neither of them could quite believe. They see entries coming in from Dublin, Laois and Cork. The local support, both are clear, is still the backbone of it.

“The best part of this is ringing people after. Their reaction is just brilliant.”

Brendan Mullen, Voices of Boyle

What is coming next

A points programme has just gone live. Every euro spent earns five points, each point worth a cent, so 250 points covers a two euro fifty entry. Points sit in your account on the website and can go towards a discount or a full free entry.

After that comes Instant Wins. Winning ticket numbers are drawn at random in advance, so a buyer finds out immediately whether their number is one of them, and that entry still goes into the main draw at the end.

Further out, Camilla talks about week long holidays rather than weekend getaways, moving from one or two draws a week to Monday and Thursday, working with local and national charities, and eventually cars.

“That’s the plan,” she says. “That’s the master plan.”

Boyle stories

The second half of the conversation goes where these conversations usually go.

Brendan remembers being outdoors constantly, and the Gala Festival in summer with fireworks and music on the streets. The funfair behind the hall, and before that on the Crescent, where the story goes that from the top of one of the rides you could see clear across the town. Later it moved to the Green Street car park and then the Royal.

St Patrick’s Day and the buzz of spring. The hot air balloons, back this year and running across a full week rather than a single weekend, which he reckons will give families a fair chance to get out and see them. He has already floated it with his two girls, Kayla and Daisy. He explained that the balloons go way up into the sky, and they decided they would watch from the ground.

Florence passes on something she learned from a previous episode, which is that the balloons are not purely for show. The pilots compete against each other. Years ago in Boyle one task involved a key placed out on the lake, and the pilots had to bring the balloon down close enough to the water to collect it without going in.

They compare schools. Brendan went through St Mary’s and finished at the Abbey College, in what he thinks was the first mixed Leaving Cert year. Camilla went to primary in Corrigeenroe and secondary in Carrick, largely because the school bus passed her door. Two of her sisters went to the Abbey College and her three brothers to school in Boyle, so she grew up hearing the stories without being in them.

They land on Cleo’s, and Parker’s out at the Forest Park Hotel, and how far people used to walk home from it without thinking anything of it.

Four years with Emirates

Camilla was based in Dubai from 2012 to 2016, working as cabin crew for Emirates. Her sister was out there doing the same job, and so was Aoife Brady from Boyle. Three friends from the same town, all flying for the same airline.

She has lost count of the countries. Asked to name one, she does not hesitate.

“Zanzibar,” she says. She went a few times, flying from Dubai into Dar es Salaam and across from there, and what she loved was how uncommercialised it was. A place to switch off entirely.

She came home in 2016 and has not wanted to leave since.

“I was a home bird then. I had no intentions of going travelling again.”

Something on every night

Brendan’s girls are eleven and seven and are in clubs most nights of the week, which he offers as evidence for something he clearly believes.

“There’s so much going on,” he says. “There’s something going on in Boyle the whole time.”

How Eire Competitions works

Entries are bought on the website at eirecompetitions.ie. Prices generally run from two euro to five, occasionally ten depending on the prize. You create an account, buy your entry, and the ticket number is emailed to you.

Every competition has a maximum number of entries, which Camilla points out is not how a lot of raffles work. Once the cap is reached, that is it, so the odds are fixed rather than open ended.

Draws take place on Facebook on Monday nights, sometimes one a week and sometimes two, using a random number generator.