Cooper brand is helping to keep hurlers safe

Date Published: {J}

AFTER fighting a High Court battle which almost took his company to the brink of extinction, Ronan Lally of Cooper is hoping his business has turned the corner, once again, with the impending launch of its new helmet – the Cooper SK 109 – on November 20.

Already, the new helmet is eagerly anticipated – maybe not in the same way as a new Harry Potter book would have been – but the interest, nonetheless, among hurling enthusiasts has resulted in a huge amount of advanced pre-orders.

To some extent, it is only now that Lally can allow himself to breathe a sigh of relief, having spent a year locking horns with the GAA over the safety standards of his helmets, which met European standards – those covering other headgear such as cricket helmets – but were not deemed acceptable by Croke Park.

In any event, it had a significant impact on his business. “I think last year, between the whole issue with the GAA and Croke Park and, I suppose, with the recession, it was a very quiet year. There was probably a bit of a recovery up to September this year though, where we regained a lot of sales and things were much more positive,” says the Ballinasloe man.

However, he notes it was unfortunate matters came to a head the way they did between Cooper and the GAA. “I am a GAA person myself and the last thing I wanted to do was go into the High Court with an issue like this, but I was protecting my business at the same time.

“So, it was a big stumbling block for us because it affected our sales in a lot of ways. We were trying to protect our reputation as far as the helmet goes, but in saying that we got huge support from people who said they were happy to let their kids wear our helmets. They never had a problem, which was great.

“The GAA, though, had aligned to one safety standard. Up to that time [late 2009], they didn’t align themselves to anything. They basically accepted a helmet with the CE mark or a helmet that had any sort of a bump test done. For our part, we had an actual test done with the helmet that was set up in a test house factory in England.

“They actually did very stringent tests on the helmet and it would be the equivalent of what they did with cricket helmets. If anyone looked at the test and you showed them the velocity the helmet was hit at, no one would ever have a problem of letting their child wear a Cooper.”

In any event, the dispute was finally settled in August of last year and since then the father-of-one has been rebuilding a brand that has had a long and colourful association with sport in this country. Introduced in the mid to late 1960s, the Cooper helmet was originally intended to cater for skate boarding, ice hockey and kayaking, among other sports.

However, as the helmets filtered in from North America and Canada, they began to make an appearance on the hurling fields, with members of the Fenian club in Kilkenny – comprising of the famed Henderson, Fennelly and Delaney families – among the first to embrace the headgear.

“The earliest person I know myself was a guy in Monaghan, whose name is Gerry Murphy,” says Lally. “He told me he had been hurling up in the North and he went to Scandinavia, where he was at an ice hockey game and he saw a lot of them wearing Cooper helmets. He ended up buying one himself and bringing it back and using it. That helmet lasted him up to about six or seven years ago and he would have been using it from the late ‘60s up to then, when it was basically on its last legs.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.