Tadgh O’Meara Jr and his brother Damian are continuing the work of their father, who cofounded Kish Fish in Dublin almost 60 years ago. The siblings tell Jordan Mooney about the company’s success, its recent rebrand and how a product once considered low-value is now one of their biggest sellers

For an island nation, we’re oddly reluctant to engage with seafood. While we’ve definitely made strides towards including more fish and shellfish in our diets over the past decade, we still have progress to make.

Innovative Irish seafood companies are leading the way and Dublin-based Kish Fish is at the forefront of the movement. Now celebrating 60 years in business, the company was co-founded by Tadgh O’Meara Sr and Danny Hughes.

They were seafood auctioneers in Dublin’s fish markets, primarily selling whole fish to restaurants across the country. Over the years, the company evolved into processing fish and now it’s run by O’Meara’s sons, Tadgh Jr and Damian.

The duo, along with their late older brother Bill, took over the company in the late 1990s before Tadgh Sr passed away in 2000. In the interim years, they continued to grow the business to focus on their key tenet of delivering quality seafood.

At their core, the O’Mearas say they’re a true family business. "Our family has always been very hands-on with the business. Our mother looked after the retail side of things until she retired and our father was very involved up until he passed away, but he had already really handed over the reins to us by then,” Tadgh O’Meara says.

“In 1979, Dad bought a premises on Bow Street to process the fish that wasn’t sold, then smoke it. At the time, that was perceived as a lesser value product, but it’s totally flipped over now and smoked fish is much more sought after.

“I came on board in 1995 and the processing of fish, which hadn’t really been done when the company started, was really starting to develop. It became less expensive for chefs to get the product bought in already skinned, pin-boned and portioned, rather than covering the skilled labour cost to do it in-house themselves.”

The brothers didn’t anticipate joining the business initially, stating that it was actually mostly their brother Bill and their father who were focused on it. When they did join, Tadgh took over sales and marketing, while Damian did production and Bill looked after finance and distribution.

In 2004, with further expansion from the Bow Street location on their minds, the O’Mearas began to look for a central production space. They purchased their Coolock premises in 2006. “We retrofitted the Coolock space to suit the demands of our customers; we were constantly adapting to their requirements,” Damian O’Meara says.

“If they said ‘we want de-scaled fish’, then we would build a room for de-scaling fish. When they needed pinboned fish, we purchased a machine for pinboning. We were always finding solutions for the restaurateurs that we worked with.

“We moved into the Coolock location in 2008 and we decided to build a factory shop there too, because there are a lot of meat factories with shops in that industrial estate, so it meant there was a lot of footfall.

“We hung on to Bow Street too — there aren’t a lot of fish shops in the city centre, because it is expensive to rent, but that’s ours. Then we acquired the space in Howth in 2016, which already had a shop and a smoker.

“Until then, we had stopped smoking the fish ourselves, but that gave us the ability to get back in control of our own product with our name on it.”

Smoked fish has become the company’s biggest seller, according to the brothers. With Damian now the director of operations and Tadgh the managing director, Kish Fish has experienced serious growth over the past number of years, with its 2023 profit standing at almost €2 million, up from €729,102 in 2022.

With about €20m in annual turnover, the company is aiming to hit €25m soon and has grown to around 150 staff members across the business.

In addition to its processing space in Coolock, it sells direct to the public from Bow Street and Howth, as well as through a concession at the large Avoca outlet in Dunboyne, Co Meath.

Its primary customers are restaurants, cafés and hotels, who purchase through its wholesale arm. But retail has been a big driver for the company, with the Howth location acting as a sort of base for them with its production kitchen, smokehouse and café.

Earlier this year, the space hosted a launch for Kish Fish’s light rebrand and its newest collaboration with Guinness. The rebrand focused on bringing sub-brands like Baily & Kish, which encompassed the smoked fish products, under the main Kish Fish branding.

But the partnership with Guinness had been in the works for over two and a half years, resulting in Guinness Smoked Salmon by Kish Fish, which is available to wholesale customers or to those shopping in the company’s four retail outlets.

The Guinness Storehouse was one of Kish Fish’s biggest customers, with executive chef Sean Hunter curing salmon in Guinness himself before approaching the O’Mearas to partner on this new product. It joins the company’s smoked fish roster that also includes smoked trout and mackerel.

“We’ve won multiple Blas na hÉireann awards and Great Taste awards for our products, including our smoked salmon, smoked trout and chowder. We smoke all of our own fish on-site here ourselves in Howth, and I think that’s our unique selling point, that we’re doing our own Irish products instead of importing them,” Damian O’Meara says.

“From our production kitchen in Howth, we make chowders, pies, battered cod, fish cakes and the like. We sell them through our retail stores, but we also have lots of wholesale customers, like hotels and restaurants, who we would sell these products to directly. Then they go on their menus. We also sell them to supermarkets, like Donnybrook Fair.

“Some of these products were under different names or had different colours in the branding, and we realised after Covid that it was confusing — even we were getting confused — so we said we had to draw a line and rebrand,” Tadgh O’Meara continues.

“Basically what we did was go back to the core of our business and the core colour of purple that was established 60 years ago for a more unified look.

“We have a huge heritage in this company, with huge experience and a wealth of knowledge. Some of our staff have worked here for 40 years, they started as apprentices and worked their way up. We have a very loyal, talented team who have evolved with the company and helped us grow.”

In terms of growth, the O’Mearas have self-financed Kish Fish over the years, reinvesting profit in order to continue its upward trajectory. But they credit Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) and Bord Bia with helping them along the way too.

“We’re very lucky here in this country to have semi-state organisations that can offer us support. We don’t export at the minute, and our primary market is hotels and restaurants around the Leinster area primarily, but if we did want to export the support is there,” Tadgh explains.

“Bord Bia actually supported us through this rebrand. While we’ve no firm plans to export at this time, we’d never say never and we know the supports would be there through the likes of Enterprise Ireland.

“We’re also gold members of Origin Green, Bord Bia’s national sustainability programme for food and drink companies, which means we’re very diligent about targets like water conservation, waste reduction and heat efficiency.

“It’s not just a box-ticking exercise for us — this is ingrained in our company training and our staff are invested in sustainability to help us grow too.”

Between the rebrand and the launch of the Guinness smoked salmon, the first half of 2025 has been fairly busy for the O’Mearas but they’re hoping the rest of the year continues just as successfully.

“Over the past couple of years, there have been some issues. Geopolitical issues around the world still have an impact on stocks, while Covid meant that the price of packaging went up by a colossal amount, but we have been okay.

“After Covid, a lot of business came back to the food service industry and they did well, which we saw in our business too.

“Things steadied financially for us in 2024, and we’re hoping to see the same again this year,” Tadgh O’Meara says.

“Now, we want to batten down the hatches and continue to push forward with everything we’ve done so far. “We’ve concentrated on what our core brand and values are, and now we just want to drive that and bring it forward.”

On the Menu - smoked salmon

Available in both retail and wholesale, Kish Fish is best known for its smoked salmon. It is sold cold and hot-smoked, plus there’s an organic option on offer too.

Working pierside in their Howth location, the team uses oak to imbue that signature smoky flavour in the fish, resulting in a product that performs well across the board and has won awards for the company.

Price €5.49

Photo: Damian and Tadgh O'Meara pictured at Kish Fish, Howth, Dublin. (Pic: Tom Honan)