A GARRISON couple who were convicted in 2006 of keeping an estimated 4,500 tonnes of domestic rubbish on their 65-acre farm, have now paid back £80,000 in fines in lieu of confiscation of their property.
This was stated at Omagh Crown Court, sitting in Belfast, last week by a defence barrister who successfully applied for an adjournment of a confiscation hearing to Derry Crown Court on 12th September.
At his court appearance in ‘06, David Erwin Allingham (70) admitted being paid between £6,000 and £8,000 to allow waste from the Irish Republic to be dumped on his land at Slattinagh, Garrison.
His wife, Freda (67) had her four month imprisonment term suspended for two years, but her husband was jailed for 9 months.
He was the first person in Northern Ireland to be jailed for illegal dumping.
Last week’s hearing was told that the couple ad paid back, between them, a total of £80,000 in fines. Their barrister told the court there was an outstanding balance of around £37,000 in interest still to be paid.
His instructions were that some of this money would come from the sale of property and, also, from the sale of livestock.
The prosecution lawyer said the DPP had no objection to the adjournment.
At the time of the initial hearing. It was reported it would take a fleet of eight, 30-tonne trucks, working from Monday through to Friday for three to four weeks, to transport the waste that was buried on the Allingham farm to a licensed landfill site near Rossnowlagh.
Evidence was given that the Allinghams was the first of the uncovered dumps to be cleared as a matter of priority because effluent from it was already leaking into the surrounding countryside.
The court was told that the site lay in an environmentally sensitive area beside a river which flows into Lough Melvin.
At the time, the then environment minister, Edwin Poots revealed that it would cost the Northern Ireland taxpayer £600,000 to clear that site and another at Trillick.
However, under a north-south agreement, the Irish government ended up forking out 80 per cent of the cost of ‘expatriating’ the waste, estimated at more than £30m to the southern taxpayer.
This and other illegal dumping grew out of the ever increasing landfill costs in the south.
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