The Flight of the Earls

1607 - 1610 — The great Gaelic lords fled Ireland, ending the old Gaelic order and opening the way for the Plantation of Ulster.

In September 1607, following defeat in the Nine Years' War, Hugh O'Neill (Earl of Tyrone) and Rory O'Donnell (Earl of Tyrconnell) sailed from Rathmullan in County Donegal into permanent exile on the Continent. Their departure — remembered as the Flight of the Earls (Imeacht na nIarlaí) — marked the collapse of the old Gaelic aristocracy that had ruled Ulster for centuries.

With the native lords gone, the Crown confiscated their vast lands and, from 1609, planted them with English and Scottish Protestant settlers. This Plantation of Ulster reshaped the province's population, language and religion, and sowed divisions whose effects would echo for centuries.