But don't expect the founder of Stockbyte, whose images have graced the covers of Time and Newsweekmagazines, to spend all that spare time working on a suntan. "I'm a fairly grounded guy. A few pints is my idea of a good time, " he says.

"There won't be any Caribbean cruises."

Indeed, Kennelly won't be straying far from his home in Tralee. "Kerry is God's own country and I couldn't imagine living anywhere else." He rules out going into tax exile before the question is even asked.

With so many other self-made men fleeing offshore, tax exile has become an emotive issue and Kennelly does not want to be dragged into the row. "I'm not applying for sainthood because of my decision to stay put, " he says.

Overnight riches are the stuff of dreams for most people but Kennelly says he is unfazed by his good fortune. "There's no shell shock about it. I didn't win the lottery.

This is money I earned, " he says. "I started the process that led to the sale of Stockbyte so the eventual valuation came as no surprise."

The year off will give Kennelly plenty of time to ponder his next business move.

Other than confirming that this will be in the creative/media sector, he is keeping his cards close to his chest. "We took on the planet in this sector and won [with Stockbyte] and the plan is to build another world-beating plan, " he says.

Business is in the blood. His father Padraig, a brother of renowned Kerry poet Brendan Kennelly, set up Kerry's Eye in 1974 and, at 78 years of age, still edits the successful local newspaper. It has blossomed into a family business that now employs Kennelly's three brothers.

Padraig junior is managing director, Brendan is sales and marketing director and Kerry is pictures editor.

The media business shaped Kennelly's life from an early age. "I was 13 when my father came down to breakfast one day and announced he'd decided to start a paper, " he says. "I didn't get a lot of schooling after that."

Kennelly's father started life as a photographer and, because he was willing to invest in technology such as the latest wire services, got regular commissions from the London and international press. This was around the same time that another Kerryman, Xavier McAuliffe from Listowel, was making waves at the other end of the photography market, offering overnight processing of holiday snaps for generations of Irish families.

Jerry Kennelly headed in a different direction, setting up Stockbyte ten years ago to sell stock images for use in newspapers, advertisements and publicity campaigns around the world. The trick was to offer the entire catalogue of 85,000 images for an upfront fee rather than having customers pay royalties every time an image was used.

Heavy investment in technology, especially in online applications, allowed Stockbyte to operate around the clock from its Kerry base, with a lot of the business coming in when all the employees were tucked up in their beds.

"Jerry was on the net before anybody was on the net, " says one acquaintance.

"He always had cutting-edge technology.

I suppose he got that from his old man."

The business was profitable from the beginning and has made serious money in recent years. "The business plan I wrote 11 years ago has been executed to perfection, " Kennelly says. "We've been profitable from our first month trading."

According to the latest accounts for Star Media, the company behind Stockbyte, profits exceeded 4m before tax in the year to April 2005, five times the earnings of the previous 12 months. Profits for the current year, as yet unpublished, should comfortably exceed 10m.

The key was to expand the catalogue in the belief that, because Stockbyte knew the market so well, the risk would pay off.

Some 45,000 new images were added in two years, many of them with Kennelly behind the camera, compared to 40,000 images in the previous eight years.

"It's what I call the 'swagger factor', building up the confidence to know what would sell, " he says. "It means being able to second-guess the market in terms of what people want to buy."

As business boomed, Kennelly and his wife Johanna reaped the rewards. As the only directors, they paid themselves a modest 106,000 in pay and pension contributions in 2004. But as profits increased, so did their pay, doubling to more than 207,000 in the last year.

The tight team of 28 staff have also been well rewarded, earning average salaries of 37,000 a year. This will now be supplemented by a 5m thankyou from Kennelly and his wife, which works out at 175,000 tax-free per person.

Many now find themselves out of a job but, according to Tralee insiders, they are unlikely to be unemployed for long.

"Jerry is a very driven man and a hard task master, " said one source. "Because of this his staff were always worth their weight in gold."