Image: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie THE RETIRED DIRECTOR of a waste management company has been found guilty of three counts relating to the operation of an illegal landfill site.
Dean Kelly SC, prosecuting, said that between 2003 and 2008 a “mountain of waste” was deposited on a 25 acre site in Kerdiffstown in a way that breached two licences issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in October 2003 and in September 2006. He said that Dean was “the cog at the centre of the wheel, the entire nest of companies that is the Dean Waste empire”. He said the evidence was Dean was the kind of boss who was “on site and got his boots and hands dirty” and “knew exactly what was moving through his business”.
He said the Waste Management Act in 1996 changed the way things operated and his client hired someone “at the top of his profession in waste management” to advise him on the law. The court heard Dean hired Dr Ted Nealon, a former employee of the EPA, as an expert to advise him. He said his client and the company had retained a top shelf legal company in A&L Goodbody and Dean had “poached” expert Dr Nealon from the EPA to get the best advice. He said that “Dean Waste and Nephin Trading” were going to clear out the entire site but that was going to take time, maybe decades.
Kelly said there was a defence suggestion that during an “infamous meeting” between the EPA and Nephin Trading in September 2003, EPA officials gave a “shady permission” to the company to dump on the site and that the EPA would “turn a blind eye”.