The Flight of the Wild Geese: The Irish History Behind Our Club's Name

Every club name tells a story, and ours goes back more than three centuries. The Flight of the Wild Geese, the departure of thousands of Irish soldiers to Europe after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, became one of the most powerful images in Irish history. Here's the history behind the name, and why it felt right to a group of Irish exiles kicking a ball around Huntington Beach in 1979.

What Was the Flight of the Wild Geese?

In the narrowest sense, the Flight of the Wild Geese was a single event: the shipping of the defeated Irish Jacobite army from Ireland to France in late 1691, under the military terms of the Treaty of Limerick. Common estimates put the number who sailed at somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 soldiers, though figures vary between sources. They went to serve the exiled King James II and, through him, King Louis XIV of France.

In a broader sense, the phrase describes a century-long stream of Irish men who left home to serve in Catholic armies on the Continent. The term "Wild Geese" had been applied to Irish soldiers serving abroad even before 1691, and over the following generations it stuck. Like migratory birds, these men left Ireland, many never to return. For a quick reference overview, the Wikipedia entry on the Flight of the Wild Geese is a useful starting point.

The Williamite War in Ireland (1689–1691)

To understand why an entire army left Ireland, you need to go back to 1688. That year, the Catholic King James II of England, Scotland and Ireland was deposed in favor of his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, the Dutch prince William of Orange. James fled to France, then landed in Ireland in 1689, where much of the Catholic population and the Irish army supported him. The conflict that followed is known as the Williamite War in Ireland, or in Irish, Cogadh an Dá Rí, "the War of the Two Kings."

The Boyne and Aughrim

The war's best-known clash came at the Battle of the Boyne on July 1, 1690 (Old Style), when William's army defeated James's forces north of Dublin. James left Ireland soon afterward, but the war was far from over. The Jacobites fell back west of the River Shannon and held the line at Limerick, where a first Williamite siege in 1690 failed.

The decisive blow came on July 12, 1691, at the Battle of Aughrim in County Galway, one of the bloodiest battles ever fought in Ireland. After Aughrim, the Jacobite cause in Ireland was effectively lost. Galway surrendered, and Limerick was once again the last major stronghold.

Patrick Sarsfield and the Siege of Limerick

No figure is more closely tied to the Wild Geese than Patrick Sarsfield. A Catholic officer from an Anglo-Norman family, he became a hero during the first siege of Limerick in 1690, when he led a daring cavalry raid at Ballyneety that destroyed a Williamite siege train of guns and ammunition. The raid helped delay the attack, and the siege was eventually abandoned. James later named him Earl of Lucan.

The second siege and the Treaty of Limerick

In the late summer of 1691 the Williamite army returned to besiege Limerick. With no realistic hope of relief, the Jacobite commanders negotiated terms. The Treaty of Limerick was signed on October 3, 1691. Tradition holds it was signed on the Treaty Stone, which still stands by the River Shannon in Limerick city.

The treaty had two parts:

• The military articles allowed Jacobite soldiers who wished to do so to leave for France with their officers. This is the legal basis of the Flight of the Wild Geese.
• The civil articles promised certain protections for Catholics who stayed in Ireland. These promises were not honored in full, and the decades that followed brought the Penal Laws, which restricted Catholic rights to land, education, the professions and public life.

That sense of a broken treaty runs deep in Irish memory, and it shaped how later generations remembered the soldiers who left. The Wikipedia article on the Treaty of Limerick gives a concise account of its terms.

The Irish Brigades in France and Spain

Serving the King of France

Irish troops were already serving France before Limerick fell. In 1690, an Irish brigade under Justin MacCarthy, Lord Mountcashel, went to France in exchange for French troops sent to support James in Ireland. After 1691, Sarsfield's men joined them, at first as a separate army in the service of the exiled James. When the Nine Years' War ended in 1697, the surviving soldiers were reorganized into the regiments of what became known as the Irish Brigade of the French army.

Sarsfield himself did not live to see that. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Landen (also called Neerwinden), in present-day Belgium, in 1693, and died days later at Huy. According to a long-told tradition, he looked at the blood on his hand and spoke words that have echoed through Irish history ever since:

"Would that this were for Ireland."

Words traditionally attributed to Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, after the Battle of Landen, 1693

For generations afterward, recruits continued to slip out of Ireland to join the brigade, many from the western and southern counties. The regiments carried the names of their colonels, such as Dillon's, Clare's, Berwick's and Lally's, and they served in France's wars across Europe until the era of the French Revolution.

Irish regiments in Spain

Spain also had Irish regiments, including the Hibernia, Irlanda and Ultonia regiments. These units took Irish soldiers far beyond Europe. The Hibernia regiment, for example, served in Bernardo de Gálvez's Spanish force at the siege of British-held Pensacola, Florida, in 1781, during the American Revolutionary War. It's a little-known link between the Wild Geese and the history of the United States.

The Battle of Fontenoy, 1745

If there's one battle that defines the Wild Geese, it's Fontenoy. On May 11, 1745, during the War of the Austrian Succession, a French army under Marshal Maurice de Saxe faced an allied British, Dutch and Hanoverian army commanded by the Duke of Cumberland near the village of Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium.

At a critical moment, a powerful British infantry column was pushing into the French center. The Irish Brigade, including the regiments of Dillon, Clare, Berwick, Bulkeley, Lally and Roth along with Fitzjames's Horse, was thrown into the counterattack. Accounts of the battle record that the Irish charged with the cry "Cuimhnigí ar Luimneach agus ar fheall na Sasanach!" ("Remember Limerick and Saxon perfidy!"), a direct reference to the broken treaty more than 50 years earlier. The column was driven back and the French won the day, though the brigade paid heavily, losing a large share of its officers.

Fontenoy became a cornerstone of Irish nationalist memory in the 19th century, celebrated in poems, songs and paintings as proof that Irish soldiers abroad had kept faith with the cause they left home for.

Timeline: From the Flight of the Earls to Fontenoy

Year	Event	Why it matters
1607	Flight of the Earls: Hugh O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell leave Rathmullan, Donegal, for the Continent	End of the old Gaelic order in Ulster; often confused with the Wild Geese
1688	James II is deposed; William of Orange and Mary take the throne	Sets up the Williamite War in Ireland
1689	James II lands in Ireland	Start of the "War of the Two Kings"
1690	Battle of the Boyne (July 1, Old Style); Mountcashel's brigade goes to France; first siege of Limerick fails	Sarsfield's Ballyneety raid makes him a national hero
1691	Battle of Aughrim (July 12); second siege of Limerick; Treaty of Limerick signed October 3	The military articles allow the Jacobite army to sail for France: the Flight of the Wild Geese
1693	Sarsfield mortally wounded at the Battle of Landen	Source of the famous words "Would that this were for Ireland"
1697	End of the Nine Years' War	Exiled Jacobite soldiers reorganized into the Irish Brigade of France
1745	Battle of Fontenoy (May 11)	The Irish Brigade's most celebrated victory
1781	Siege of Pensacola, Florida	Spain's Hibernia regiment fights in the American Revolutionary War
1979	Wild Geese GFC founded in Huntington Beach, California	A new generation of Irish exiles adopts the name

Wild Geese vs. the Flight of the Earls

People often mix up these two events, and it's easy to see why: both involve Irish leaders leaving for Europe, and both mark the end of an era. But they're 84 years apart and very different in character.

• The Flight of the Earls (1607) was the departure of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, with their families and followers, from Rathmullan on Lough Swilly in September 1607. It followed their defeat in the Nine Years' War against Elizabeth I and opened the way for the Plantation of Ulster.
• The Flight of the Wild Geese (1691) was the departure of an entire defeated army, thousands of ordinary soldiers and their officers, under the terms of a negotiated treaty, to keep fighting for the Jacobite cause in the service of France.

In short, the Earls were a small group of Gaelic lords; the Wild Geese were an army, and later a whole tradition of Irish soldiers abroad.

The Wild Geese as a Symbol of the Irish Diaspora

Over time the phrase grew far beyond its military meaning. Ireland's history is a history of leaving: the soldiers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the millions who emigrated during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s, and the waves of young people who left in the 1950s and the 1980s to find work in Britain, the US, Australia and elsewhere. "Wild Geese" became a poetic way to describe all of them.

W. B. Yeats used the image in his 1913 poem "September 1913," asking whether the sacrifice of Ireland's exiles and patriots had been worth it: "Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide." The image of the grey wing over the water captures something every emigrant understands: the pull of home and the reality of a life built somewhere else.

Wherever the Irish have settled, they have built community through music, faith and sport, and Gaelic games have been part of that story in America for well over a century. We explore that history in our article on Gaelic games in North America.

From Limerick to Huntington Beach: How Our Club Got Its Name

Our club was founded in 1979 by Romy White (Offaly), Tony Mc Carthy (Clare), Brian Daly (Kerry), Peter Glenane (Galway) and John Wolfe (Kerry). They met every Sunday at the Christian Brothers of St Patrick's in Huntington Beach, a long way from the pitches they grew up on. When it came time to name the new club, the founders put it to a vote, and the choice was the Wild Geese.

It's not hard to see why the name won. Like Sarsfield's soldiers, the founders were Irishmen far from home, carrying something of Ireland with them. The club gave them, and the generations of players who followed, a place to belong in Southern California. That same year the club hosted the All Stars, and over the decades it welcomed Irish inter-county teams such as Armagh, Roscommon and Kerry, as well as clubs including Civil Service, Synge St, Knockmore, Crossmaglen and Ballyboden. You can read more about those early days on our club history page.

Today, the Wild Geese squad draws on players from all over Ireland, plus teammates from the US, Jordan, Australia and Mexico. The name has come full circle: the original Wild Geese brought Ireland to the armies of Europe, and our club brings Gaelic football to Orange County and Los Angeles. We remember one of our founders every year at the Peter Glenane Memorial tournament, first held in 2017. Upcoming events are on our schedule, and you don't have to play to be part of it: our social membership keeps supporters connected to the club.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why were Irish soldiers called the Wild Geese?

The name compares Irish soldiers who left home to serve in European armies with migratory birds. The term was used for Irish soldiers abroad before 1691 and became closely linked with the army that left after the Treaty of Limerick.

When was the Treaty of Limerick signed?

The Treaty of Limerick was signed on October 3, 1691. Its military articles allowed Jacobite soldiers to leave Ireland for France, which led to the Flight of the Wild Geese.

Who was Patrick Sarsfield?

Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, was a Jacobite commander celebrated for his defense of Limerick, including the 1690 raid at Ballyneety. He led his soldiers to France after the treaty and was mortally wounded at the Battle of Landen in 1693.

Is the Flight of the Wild Geese the same as the Flight of the Earls?

No. The Flight of the Earls took place in 1607, when the Ulster earls Hugh O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell left for the Continent. The Flight of the Wild Geese took place in 1691, when the defeated Jacobite army sailed for France.

Why is the club called Wild Geese GFC?

Our founders, Irish emigrants who started the club in Huntington Beach in 1979, chose the name by vote. It honors the Flight of the Wild Geese and reflects the shared experience of Irish people building a life far from home.