O’Neills

O'Neills is Ireland's oldest sportswear house, founded in 1918, and perhaps the brand most woven into a country's life in all of world sport: it dresses counties and parish clubs of Gaelic football and hurling from one end of the island to the other, makes the balls and sliotars the GAA is played with and still manufactures in Ireland, between Dublin and Strabane, when almost the entire industry fled elsewhere. Generations of Irish people grew up, emigrated and returned with an O'Neills in their bag. In football it dressed League of Ireland clubs and it made rugby history, but its empire lies elsewhere: in the games only Ireland plays. Few brands are, so literally, a country in the shape of a shirt.