Based in Kilnaleck, Co Cavan, KORE Insulation is an award-winning company which provides both Ireland and the UK with high-quality expanded polystyrene solutions. Building Ireland touched base with its Commercial Director Caroline Ashe Brady to hear all about the business – from its origins to the projects it has on-going at the minute.
Business is good these days at KORE Insulation and the plan for Managing Director Noel Brady and his wife and Commercial Director Caroline Ashe Brady, along with the entire team in The Green, Kilnaleck, Co Cavan, is to try and keep things that way for the foreseeable future.
Set-up in 1997, the KORE Group has grown year on year ever since to the point now where it employs 130 full-time staff.
Heading up the company are its directors Noel Brady and Caroline Ashe Brady, while Pauric Kavanagh is a founder of KORE Retrofit and Dr Barry McCarron is its Managing Director.
Also joining the senior management team last year as Sales Director was Steven McGee, with Brian Flax serving as KORE Marketing Director.
As Caroline herself puts it, she joined the KORE team “fresh out of college”, having achieved an Honours Degree in Management and Marketing before going on to complete a Masters in Strategic Procurement while she was working.
Building Ireland caught up with KORE’s Commercial Director to find out more about her early days with the company and how the business has evolved.
“Initially, I joined the business when the manufacturing side was four years off the ground. It was Noel and his father, Tommy Brady, at the time,” she outlined.
“So, when I joined the business, they had a really good, solid start. But we hit the road in the wrong way because we were manufacturing expanded polystyrene and at that time, PIR, a different type of insulation material, entered the market and, straight away, we started to be on the back foot and we struggled for a couple of years to really maintain our market share.
“What we did at that time is we were innovating with EPS and the products we had. We were one of the first companies in the country to do insulated concrete formwork.
“So we were just looking at new ways to bring about different solutions for EPS, the construction industry and then, shortly after that, we had the recession, the 2010 collapse.”
Those were different times and, as Caroline points out, it saw the KORE Group having to pivot in a different direction and zone in on the retrofit industry.
“It was a tough time,” stated the Commercial Director. “What we did was, and I often speak about it, we started looking about, you know, the new build industry had collapsed overnight and it was at that time that we started to look at where our products could go in the retrofit industry.
“SEAI had just announced grants for retrofit works for private households and that’s where we turned our attention. We developed our products into that space and we went out into the market.
“We found like-minded people who were interested in working with us through a contractor network, installing our products throughout the country.
“So we took it from there and then about 2013, we started seeing the green shoots in the new build industry and started going back after that at that time.”
Today, this family-run business very much sees itself as a one-stop shop for retrofitting and can help with the grant application process and manage the retrofit from start to finish.
Down through the years, KORE has established excellent working relationships with some of the biggest name development firms in Ireland.
KORE are supplying some of the largest developers in the country with their floor and foundation system, the likes of ClearyDoyle, Durkans and OCC Construction in Galway. They are dealing with Braidwater in Northern Ireland.
Then, in the retrofit, KORE are partnering with housing bodies retrofitting their buildings and then they are also doing more than 500 deep retrofits a year across the island of Ireland.
They are specialising at the moment in traditional homes, vacant homes, derelict homes, and then the standard deep retrofit.
So, all of that considered, the burning question is what has been the secret behind KORE’s success to date?
How has this start-up grown from humble beginnings into an award-winning firm with 130 staff which operate from a state-of-the-art facility totalling more than 45,000 square feet in Kilnaleck?
“We had decided a number of years ago that looking at the value that our product, expanded polystyrene, could bring to our customers,” Caroline stated.
“Many of them had forgotten, or the industry had forgotten about the product because of the success of PIR and we just decided that we were going to go back out with a different value proposition to our customers, getting them to understand that they could achieve exactly what they needed to achieve with a product that was, from a sustainable point of view, had much better credentials.”
KORE were also able to add value in terms of a reduced overall cost to their customers, starting on their floor insulation. The firm then built a team of people that their customers could connect to, a team of people that their customers liked, and offered a service that was the next day.
“I always talk about making things easy to do. So it’s just easy to do business with KORE, that’s what we really, really want.
“Our customers have enough hassles in their life. But also, we built our technical team, our technical offering, to give our customers absolute confidence when they bought from KORE. They ticked all of their compliance, all those things that they have to meet in terms of compliance.
“With all of those packages, the other thing, is just listening to the customers’ pain points, getting to know them, and what works,” explained Caroline.
“But what we do know now is things like value for money, fast, efficient service, and what’s coming more to the fore now is our climate credentials and low carbon and sustainable products that’s really, really becoming key in the construction industry now.”
In May, KORE came away from the Irish Construction Excellence (ICE) Awards as winners in the ‘Fit Out or Refurbishment – Up to €10m category’.
The award was for KORE Retrofit’s Passive House Bungalow project in Monaghan, which was led by Barry McCarron FCIAT.
The project demonstrated how deep energy retrofits, when combined with Passive House design, can create highly efficient, climate-resilient homes.
KORE Insulation also won the ‘Construction Product Innovation – Building Fabric’ award for their Low Carbon Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) products.
Caroline expressed her delight on behalf of the team winning two prestigious awards.
“You know, you work as an organisation, you’re always working so hard. We’ve been doing really well in terms of what we were achieving.
“These awards mean a huge amount to the team. It’s great recognition for our manufacturing side and for KORE retrofit and these are projects that we have worked tirelessly improving, looking at sustainability, doing things better and just bringing real value to the market.”
To top things off, Caroline recently took home the ‘Excellence in Senior Leadership – Contractor/Subcontractor’ gong at the Women in Construction Awards 2025 on June 6th at Crowne Plaza Hotel, Santry.
KORE’s Commercial Director stated: “I was delighted to win the award. I love to celebrate women in construction and particularly in our Retrofit side, over 50% of our team are women.
“I think both genders do an incredible job, but when you mix us together, we’re even better. When you have a mix of male and females working together, it really adds to it.
“So to be able to represent all of the women in KORE, because I’m just one of us, to be able to represent is fantastic. It is a great honour.
Looking towards the coming months for the business, Caroline says they’ll be eager to continue growing at KORE and, as well as that, continue to focus on making it an enjoyable place for their employees to work.
“Well, I suppose, we want to keep doing what we’re doing. On the news this morning, EcoVerify announced that they were the first company in the world to be accredited, a third-party accreditation for net zero, for their net zero pathways, and we were their first client.
“We’ve been certified. So we’re the first company in the world to be certified for net zero. When we’re looking at our business moving forward, we’re thinking about how we make solutions easier, how we streamline our business so that we can make it easier for our customers to do business.
“But how do we layer on that value? How do we bring all of the sustainable credentials? How do we digitalise?
“And the other thing for KORE, and the big thing is, how do we make sure that this is just a really nice place to work? That we come into work and we feel like we’re treated well, we treat each other well, and we continue to build a team that just goes to battle for KORE every day. We want a happy and content workplace and that’s really key for us,” she concluded.
KORE Insulation
The Green,
Kilnaleck,
Co Cavan.
A82 T291
Tel: 353 (0) 49 433 6998
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.kore-system.com
This article was published in Building Ireland Magazine, September, Vol 11 No 10
