A legacy of stewardship across generations.
“Every family leave something behind… Some leave buildings, some leave businesses, some leave stories and some lead values and respect. The Mayne and Kissane families chose to leave something that continues to work long after today's decisions have been forgotten.”
West Ireland Investments began as most entrepreneurial businesses do, a small portfolio and a handful of dreams. Over the years, the exponential growth has fuelled Steve and Lorna Mayne’s drive to look beyond this and to help with building other people’s futures.
“But almost from the start, there was a second belief running alongside the first: that the value being created was never meant to serve only the people who created it”
The M&K Foundation exists because success was never seen as an end in itself. From the earliest years of West Ireland Investments, there was an understanding that the value created through careful stewardship carried with it an equally important responsibility. Prosperity gains meaning when it extends beyond those who earned it.
Today, the Foundation continues that commitment. It supports schools where opportunity begins, communities where people belong, and projects whose value cannot always be measured immediately but becomes unmistakable over time.
There are no campaigns. No fundraising drives. No public appeals. Only a quiet commitment to invest in places and people with patience, consistency, and purpose.
The name is not a brand. It is a record.
M for Mayne. K for Kissane, Lorna’s family name — carried forward because the Foundation was always meant to belong to both families equally.
That’s the whole point. This was never a corporate name, or a public statement. It’s family instinct — to look after your own — and the choice to widen who that includes.
“We don’t fund the Foundation by asking for donations. It comes straight from West Ireland Investments’ profits – consistently, intentionally and without leaning on other goodwill.”
“It’s much about principle as it is about how things are set up. It means the Foundation’s giving never depends on someone else having a bad year or someone else’s agenda. It means the call on what gets funded, and what doesn’t, rests entirely with the people who set it up.
Every family carries an unwritten set of rules about what matters. For the Maynes and Kissanes, they have always included the following, however plainly stated:
Our children will inherit more than a business. They will inherit a responsibility to keep looking outward, to keep asking what more can be done and to understand that the Mayne and Kissane name was never meant to sit quietly on a letterhead. It was meant to be useful.
“So that’s the story up to this point. What comes next is already being written in the lives and communities we touch. We haven’t finished building anything — we’ve only started.”
