There is a way of looking at the Wild Geese story that is purely numerical, and the numbers are startling.
In the course of the eighteenth century, the Irish soldiers who had left after 1691 and the sons they raised in France, Spain, Austria, and Russia, produced an improbable concentration of senior military achievement. Historians who have catalogued the diaspora officer corps have found more than a dozen Field Marshals — the highest military rank then existing in European armies — of Irish origin or direct Irish descent. They served in France, Austria, Spain, Russia, Argentina, Chile, and the United States.
To place this in context: Ireland in 1691 was a country of approximately two million people, largely agricultural, largely poor, largely without formal educational institutions that could produce the trained professional officer class that the Field Marshal rank represented. The Wild Geese who left that country and the sons they raised on foreign soil produced a concentration of senior military talent that was statistically extraordinary.
The argument is sometimes made that this reflects the natural intelligence and capability of the Irish people. That may be partially true, but it is also a less interesting explanation than the one the evidence actually supports. It reflects what happens when a people who have been forcibly prevented from expressing their capabilities at home are given, elsewhere, the conditions in which those capabilities can develop.
Ireland in 1691 had no place for an Irish Catholic to rise in the military establishment, the legal establishment, or the political establishment. Europe had places. The Irish went there and rose.
The only thing the suppression had suppressed was the opportunity. The talent was always there.
