Flight Path

There are histories where the beginning is still happening.

So it is with the event known as the Flight of the Earls. Over four hundred years ago, in September 1607, the news reached the native population of Ulster, the most Gaelic province of Ireland and the one that had held out the longest against the English, that the most powerful chieftain in Ireland, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, leader of the resistance during the Nine Years' War, had set sail in an unnamed French warship for Europe from Rathmullan on Lough Swilly in Derry, with ninety-nine others, including the nobility of the north, their wives and children and followers. The desperate centuries-long warfare with England was over, the native culture and order was broken.

His brother Cormac O'Neill wrote of his leadership, 'For all the Irish obey O'Neill as sails obey the wind. For they have as much love for him as sons do for their parents both for his own sake as for hatred of the English.' And with his departure the Gaelic dispensation of Tanistry and Brehon law that had lasted for millennia, a whole way of life and culture, was doomed. It was calamity for people like us, his henchmen, his clan, his soldiers. The waves behind his ship are still breaking on our shores.

The event was not called the Flight of the Earls until a century later and many think the term is misguided and loaded – that there was nothing fugitive about their journey but rather that the leaders of Ulster had left for Spain to get help and reinforcements to continue the bitter fight to the death. But nevertheless, a flight it was, leaving Ulster rudderless, open to the worst, to what was inevitably going to happen, to the storms ahead, to the wreck of a nation.

That benighted voyage is on an endless loop of what if ... and if only ... to those to whom the worst did happen. My family for a start.

A list preserved in the Borghese Papers in Rome records that as the ship at last reached the shores of France after a hellish crossing, which took twenty-three days when it should have taken four or five – there was one barrel of water left (though there were five gallons of beer). The sad fugitives – not unlike the ones we see now every day on our screens, pushed out of their homeland on to stormy seas to seek refuge where they may – landed near Rouen, exhausted and sick, and began their epic journey across Europe. Their hopes for further help from Spain were fruitless and The O'Neill died in Rome in 1616.

O'Neill had held together many opposing strands in Ulster – the chieftains quarrelled among themselves and cattle raids were a way of life, and he was arbiter of these quarrels; the English were always on the rampage, burning, killing, annexing territory and he negotiated with them and with their Queen. He knew that the war he was waging was between two wholly different civilizations, the one despising the other. So, the Flight is one of the most calamitous events in Irish history. Everything fell apart. The Annals of the Four Masters, written in the early seventeenth century, judged it thus: 'Woe to the heart that meditated, woe to the mind that conceived, woe to the council that decided on, the project of their setting out on this voyage, without knowing whether they should ever return to their native principalities or patrimonies to the end of the world.' With the leaders gone, the way lay clear for the agrarian settlement known as the Plantation of Ulster, a weasel description of illegal acquisition and theft. Our land was taken, brought under English jurisdiction and laws and parcelled out to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland and, as the historian George Hill wrote in his book The Plantation of Ulster, 'When the native gentry lost their homes and houses they received short shrift; anyone found lingering around their old homes could expect to be shot ... The British settlers generally do not appear to have had any kind thoughts or sympathies; for that class who had been more respectable than themselves they naturally cherished a vague terror ... We may imagine something of the agony and dismay of those who had occupied positions of comfort and respect throughout the several counties of Ulster but who were doomed to be outcast on their own soil.'

We may well imagine. I don't need to – the agony and dismay is in our DNA. My English name is Devlin but it is also Doibhlin (with prefix Ni because I am female; the male line is O'Doibhlin). It is an ancient Irish tribal name or more accurately it is the name of an Irish sept – a branch of a clan.

The O'Doibhlin had been part of the praetorian guard to The O'Neill. They were horsemen and what might now be called courtiers, though from the sound of it they were far from courtly, since their duties included the taking and guarding of hostages and collecting fines for robbery.

My grandfather was known as the Hatchet Man. I thought that it was a contemporaneous nickname given because he had a terrifying temper, and only years later discovered that the appellation was passed from generation to generation and comes from our breeding – to have a temper which rarely erupts but, when provoked, is upsetting all round, or, as cousin Willie said on seeing mine in action, 'fuckin' lethal'.

The clan lived beside Lough Neagh, near three sites of great significance in our history: Tullyhogue, O'Neill's headquarters (the name means Mound of the Young Warriors), and two settlements, small towns now called Dungannon and Stewartstown. Dungannon was from the Gaelic, Dun Eigeann. Stewartstown is a new name: it was originally known as An Craobh and is still called that by old local people. It too was an O'Neill stronghold. The O'Doibhlin had a castle near the lough, at Roughan, where our legend has it that in one battle a thousand of our sept were killed.

Tullyhogue, the crowning place of the kings of Ulster with its throne and its crowning stone, was the centre of the world for my ancestors. It was destroyed by the piratical Sir Toby Caulfeild – what a piece of work he was – who was appointed receiver of the rents of The O'Neill after the...