In 1662, the English Restoration government settled accounts with the soldiers and adventurers of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Colonel John Eyre had served in the military campaign at Galway. His reward was 800 acres in the parish of Donanaughta in east County Galway, with the legal right to empark the land—to enclose it as a private estate. He took the title of his new domain from his own surname: Eyrecourt. The small town nearby borrowed it. So did the country house he commissioned in the 1660s or early 1670s, one of the first classical country houses in Ireland. Eyre served as MP for County Galway and as High Sheriff in 1681. When he died in 1685, the estate passed to his eldest son, John—known to his contemporaries as Proud Eyre.

Mary Granville visited in 1731 and noted 'a great many fine woods and improvements that looked very English' in the parkland. Decades later, Richard Cumberland called the place 'a spacious mansion, not in the best repair' set within 'a vast extent of soil, not very productive.' The exterior was a symmetrical seven-bay two-storey block, with a central staircase and hall taking up nearly a third of the interior. The interior was the spectacle. Massive doorcases, ambitious wood-carvings, a chimneypiece following a design by the Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio—and the staircase. Dutch craftsmen are thought to have worked on the carving, possibly with the Dublin-based French émigré James Tabary. Carved leaves spilled down the rails. Grotesque masks supported the newels. It was Irish baroque at its most theatrical, in a house whose motto—'Welcome to the house of liberty,' carved over the main door—was a statement made by the recently very planted to the recently very unplanted.

Local tradition holds that Godert de Ginkell's Williamite army camped at Eyrecourt the night after the Battle of Aughrim on 12 July 1691. Aughrim was the bloodiest battle ever fought in Ireland: about 7,000 men died in a single afternoon on a low hill 25 kilometres to the west of Eyrecourt. The Jacobite cause in Ireland collapsed there. The Williamite victors, marching east towards the Shannon, would have passed Eyrecourt's parkland. The Eyre family had backed the right side. The Catholic Irish landowners around them had backed the losing one. The redistribution of estates that followed Aughrim consolidated Protestant landholding in east Galway for the next two centuries, and the Eyre dynasty was at the centre of it.

The house passed from John to his son George (High Sheriff in 1706, died young in 1710), to George's brother John, to a third brother the Revd Giles, Dean of Killaloe and Clonfert. Giles's son John was made Baron Eyre—and died childless in 1781, ending the peerage. The house was inherited by his nephew Lieutenant-Colonel Giles Eyre, High Sheriff in 1798, who spent his fortune on unsuccessful electioneering. His son John (1794–1856) was killed while hunting. The estate descended in 1890 to William Henry Gregory Eyre, an Assistant Land Commissioner. By the early twentieth century, Eyrecourt was no longer a working country seat. The roof came off. The interior fittings were sold or removed. The staircase made its way to America in the 1920s and to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The walls remained where they stood and slowly stopped being walls.

The chapel built in 1677, the parkland, the demesne gates—restored by the National Heritage Council in the 1990s—are all that remain in coherent form. The shell of the main house stands roofless in long grass, the symmetrical façade still readable, the central doorway still pierced where the motto once arched above it. The famous staircase, carved by Dutch hands for an English colonel in a Galway field, now climbs nothing in particular under the lights of a Detroit gallery. The house of liberty is mostly sky now. The carving, removed three thousand miles, is the better-preserved fragment of a building whose absence is felt more than its presence ever was.