Henry John Temple (1784 – 1865) aka Lord Palmerston is best known for serving twice as Prime Minister of the UK in 1855 and 1859.

However, in Ireland, he is remembered as the notorious absentee landlord who evicted 2,000 tenants for non-payment of rent during the Great Famine. 

• Based in Westminster, the Anglo-Irish Temple family owned a huge estate in Co. Sligo. and he succeeded to his father's Irish peerage as the 3rd Viscount Palmerston in 1802.

• In 1808 he visited Sligo and planned improvements for Mullaghmore and its harbour which opened in 1828.

• He developed Classibawn Castle at Mullaghmore as a holiday home but died before it was completed.  

He asserted that any great improvement in the social system of Ireland "must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation through a long-continued and systematic ejectment of smallholders and of squatting cottagers." 

Through his Sligo agent, Mr Kincaid, he also financed the emigration of his starving Irish tenants on coffin ships to North America. In 1847, the Carricks of Whitehaven, the first of nine ships carrying émigré tenants from Lord Palmerston’s Sligo estates, sank off the coast of Canada. Of the 167 passengers only 48 reached the shores

READ MORE Carrick Shipwreck 1847

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