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.

Francis Nathaniel Clements, Vicar of Norton and Canon of Durham (who first married Charlotte King, daughter of Rev.

In 1831, he was promoted captain, having served in Portugal between 1826 and 1827, and that same year was appointed an aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Over the next two decades, his overbearing behaviour as a landlord brought him much hatred from his tenants, Catholic and Protestant alike, whom he evicted with equal enthusiasm.

According to his biographer Fiona Slevin, Lord Leitrim was accused by some of "repeatedly [violating] young girls and [claiming] droit du seigneur ... some of his peers repeated accusations of his 'immorality towards daughters of tenants' in the House of Commons and named him 'the bad earl'.

[3] 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.

[2] "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.

"[6] 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".

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