William Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim

William Sydney Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim (15 October 1806 – 2 April 1878), was an Anglo-Irish nobleman and landlord notorious in Irish history for his mistreatment of his tenants. He was assassinated in the north of County Donegal in Ireland in April 1878.

Early life William Sydney Clements was born in Dublin on 15 October 1806. He was the second son of the 2nd Earl of Leitrim and the former Mary Bermingham (1840). Aside from his elder brother, he had three younger brothers, including Capt. Hon. Charles Skeffington Clements, MP for Leitrim, the Hon. George Robert Anson Clements of the Royal Navy, and the Rev. Hon. Francis Nathaniel Clements, Vicar of Norton and Canon of Durham (who first married Charlotte King, daughter of Rev. Gilbert King, and, after her death, Amelia Verner, eldest daughter of Sir William Verner, 1st Baronet).

His paternal grandparents were the 1st Earl of Leitrim (son and heir of the Rt. Hon. Nathaniel Clements and the former Hannah Gore, a daughter of the Very Rev. William Gore, Dean of Down) and the former Lady Elizabeth Skeffington (eldest daughter of the 1st Earl of Massereene). His mother was the eldest daughter and co-heiress of William Bermingham of Ross Hill and Mary (née Ruttledge) Bermingham (eldest daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Ruttledge).

Leitrim was deeply opposed to Gladstone's Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 and was one of eight peers to protest against the legislation when it reached the House of Lords. Among those he also quarrelled with were the Presbyterian minister of Milford in North Donegal, and the Lord Lieutenant himself, The 7th Earl of Carlisle, who removed him from his appointments as a justice of the peace for Counties Leitrim, Donegal, and Galway.

Death In April 1878, after surviving various attempts on his life, Lord Leitrim was shot dead, along with his clerk and driver, near Cratlagh Wood while on his way to Milford (a village he owned in its entirety) from his home, Manor Vaughan (usually known as Mulroy House), on the shores of Mulroy Bay.

Leitrim was buried in Dublin at St. Michan's Church, amid scenes of great agitation. "The mob wanted to wreak their drunken rage on the dead body of the old Earl, as it was not enough that he had been murdered; and when they were disappointed in their charitable desire to throw the corpse into the street, they howled and yelled an accompaniment of brutal hate to the funeral service. It was a disgraceful affair, scarcely possible in any other latitude of the civilized world."

A monument with a cross was set up at Kindrum in 1960 honoring McElwee, Shiels, and Michael Heraghty as the men whose actions "Ended the tyranny of landlordism".

In popular culture The murder forms a major element in the plot of the 2005 play The Home Place by Brian Friel.

Mick Blake wrote a song about Lord Leitrim - Leitrim (a brief history).