North Antrim farmer is fined £6,000 for illegal dump on his land

Imposing £3,000 fines in each of the two charges Alan Chestnutt faced, Judge Alistair Devlin said given the fact the 52-year-old had been interviewed for an earlier offence when NI Environment Agency inspectors spotted further waste on his land, “the defendant's actions must in all the circumstances be regarded as having been either wholly intentional or at the very least as reckless.”

The Antrim Crown Court judge said given Chestnutt’s involvement in another offence which has not yet been dealt with, “the defendant cannot for one moment have reasonably believed that he was lawfully permitted to act as he chose to act.”

“In the assessment of the court, the defendant's actions must in all the circumstances be regarded as having been either wholly intentional or at the very least as reckless,” said the judge.

While the Crown case was that the 52-year-old benefitted to the tune of around £15,750, the defence contended that taking account of the gate fees and landfill tax the criminal benefit was £7,450 and in passing sentence, Judge Devlin said he was ”broadly accepting” of the lower defence figure.

At an earlier hearing Chestnutt, from the Haw Road in Bushmills, entered guilty pleas to two offences of depositing and keeping controlled waste on dates between 10 June 2021 and 22 May 2022.

In his sentencing remarks today the judge alluded to the fact that “the court is of course aware that you have been prosecuted and have pleaded guilty in another case involving another site” in proceedings which are still awaiting sentence.

That case relates to Chestnutt dumping 18,000 tonnes of controlled waste on land on the Cabragh Road in Bushmills between January 2017 and January 2019.

Judge Devlin said the offences before him today related to 500 tonnes of concrete, tarmac, rubble and top soil being dumped on a different site on the Cabragh Road.

In June 2021 two inspectors from NIEA saw two lorries “actually in the course of depositing soil and clay on the site” and when they spoke to the lorry drivers, they confirmed they were there at Chestnutt’s request.

The following March 2022 NIEA investigators attended at the site and “upon arrival, they noted a number of pieces of tar and concrete at the entrance to the field.”

“They also noted between 40 and 50 mounds of soil, clay, concrete and rubble, and behind those mounds they noted a levelled area which seemed to have been infilled before being flattened and the two officers estimated about 500 tons of material to be present on the surface of the ground,” Judge Devlin told the court.

When Chestnutt was spoken to he “agreed that there had been approximately 500 tons deposited on the site” but that “it wasn't enough for what you needed to do.”

During formal interviews Chestnutt claimed clay had been drawn to the site but that other materials “was from another farm” but he accepted that he had no waste transfer notes and also that he had not applied for any authorisation to deposit the materials in question.

Imposing the fines Judge Devlin said while he accepted the materials in this case were all non-hazardous and had not caused environmental damage to wildlife or flora, there was however a “significant aggravating feature.”

He highlighted that having been interviewed about the other offences in April 2018, “the fact that the defendant came to commit these current offences at a time well after he had already been found by enforcement officers to have been depositing substantial quantities of waste, a very short distance away…must rank as a significant aggregating feature of this current offending, rendering his actions and his state of mind at the relevant time as being at the very least reckless and probably intentional.”