 The castle remained in the hands of the MacSweeney family for almost two hundred years until it fell into the hands of English settlers in the aftermath of the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century.It was there that Owen Roe O'Neill returned in 1642 to lead the Ulster Army of the Irish Confederate forces during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.The castle changed hands repeatedly during the 17th-century struggle for control of Ireland between the English and the Irish.