Tayto's 350 workers in Dublin are set to share $1 million (£735,294) courtesy of a US muilti-millionairess. Ms Loida Lewis, widow of the founder of TLC Beatrice International Holdings Inc, which recently sold Tayto to Cantrell & Cochrane for £65 million (€82.5 million), has decided the $1 million should be given to the workers as a gesture of thanks for their work over the years. The bonus will vary in size depending on length of service, but will average £2,100 per employee.

"Mrs Lewis, in particular, felt very strongly about this," said a spokesman for the New York-based holding company.

"She is a very spiritual and empathetic person and she visited Dublin a number of times and got to know the people in Tayto. It's with mixed feelings that she is letting it go."

Mrs Lewis was in the process of drafting a letter to the employees in which she would express her thanks, he added.

Beatrice Foods International was the subject of a $985 million leveraged buyout in 1987 headed by Mr Lewis. He renamed the company TLC Beatrice International Holdings - TLC standing for The Lewis Company. It was once the largest black American-owned company in the US.

Mr Lewis died in 1993, aged 50, just weeks after he was diagnosed as having brain cancer.

He was a Harvard-educated Wall Street lawyer and venture capitalist who headed the leverage buyout put together with junk-bond financing. He also wrote a book entitled:

Why should white guys have all the fun?

After his death, Mrs Lewis said her husband's success "disproved the lie that a person of colour couldn't make it to the very top of financial America". Neither of the couple's two daughters was interested in taking over the running of the business and, in recent years, Mrs Lewis has overseen the sale of the holding company's subsidiaries around the world, including the $576 million sale of a French food distribution business.

The company is 51 per cent owned by the Lewis family and the money realised by the sale of its various companies in being distributed among the shareholders.

Apart from the Lewis family, the other shareholders are a number of individuals and various institutions.

The spokesman said he did not know what the institutions felt about the decision to give $1 million to the Dublin workers. "I guess its unusual, especially in the corporate world," he said.

In June, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the US was given $1 million by the Reginald F. Lewis Family & Foundation.