Mount Temple House,

Co. Sligo.

Documenting our Heritage

Mount Temple House was built around 1860 during the time when Henry Temple the 3rd Viscount Palmerston began to improve his Irish estate in County Sligo.

During the Confiscation of Connaught in the 17th Century, land was divided up amongst Cromwell’s adventurers and soldiers. The two main beneficiaries were the Gore-Booth family of Lissadell who were given 32,000 acres and Sir John Temple, who became the 1st Viscount Palmerston, who was granted 12,000 acres. Rents of  Sir John Temple’s properties were collected by middlemen and forwarded to the family in Hampshire, England.

The first member of the Temple family to set foot in Ireland was Henry John Temple, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston, better known as Lord Palmerston who had served two terms as Prime Minister of England.

Lord Palmerston's record during the Great Famine has been described as shamefull. In 1847, nine passenger ships carrying over 2000 people left Sligo port. The ships were filled with emigrants - Palmerson's evicted tenants, who arrived in Canada half naked, half starved and totally destitute.

The city of St. John in Quebec province Canada, who had taken many of the emigrants, sent Lord Palmerston an angry scathing letter complaining of his treatment of his tenants which showed ‘total lack of regard to humanity or even common decency’. The graves of many of these unfortunate victims can be seen today on the old quarantine station, now a museum, at Grosse Ille near Quebec.

Viscount Palmerston was a title in the Peerage of Ireland created on 12 March 1723, along with the subsidiary title Baron Temple of Mount Temple, County Sligo.

In 1865, upon the death of Lord Palmerston, the third Viscount, the title of Baron Temple of Mount Temple became extinct.