The High Court ordered the first three respondents in a Laois County Council waste-remediation case to be committed to prison for six months, but suspended the order for 12 months on condition that they complete the required works within that period. The ruling followed an application over their failure to carry out a court-ordered clean-up at Knockacrin, Timahoe, County Laois.
The court had ordered the respondents in April 2006 to complete works under an agreed Remedial Action Plan by 29 September that year. The plan required removal of deposited waste to authorised facilities and remediation of the site. The judgment records that the site contained more than 10,000 tonnes of waste material and that the Council estimated the removal and remediation would cost €1.5 million.
Council affidavits described little progress by May and June 2006, including incomplete site preparation and works that, according to the Council’s evidence, allowed contaminated leachate to escape more easily. The judge concluded that the required works had not been completed by the deadline. He said the respondents’ stated reason for inaction had been a lack of resources.
The respondents challenged the committal application on procedural grounds. The judge found that an order copy served on their former solicitors in July 2006 was incomplete, but that later service by registered post on the unrepresented respondents was valid and timely for the application. He also accepted that the original order was “not a model of clarity” and that the notice of motion did not adequately state how the respondents were alleged to have breached it. However, he concluded that the respondents knew what the agreed plan required and had suffered no prejudice from those defects.
The court ordered the committal of the first, second and third respondents for six months, suspended for 12 months on condition that they complete the plan’s works during that period. It did not order the fifth respondent’s committal, finding that he had not flagrantly breached the order and had not been served with the order or the committal motion. The ruling does not state a committal order against the fourth respondent.