A Belfast man who admitted operating an illegal dump on the side of Belfast's Black Mountain has been spared jail.
Hugh Corey (70) also escaped being fined for the blot on the landscape at his Tullyrush Road home in the Hannahstown area of the Black Mountain.
Her honour Judge McCaffrey said that in light of Corey being fined and ordered to pay costs of over £4,500 earlier this year for operating a dump site without a licence, it was not appropriate to impose further monetary penalties.
The Belfast Crown Court judge said given his age and health, she was prepared to suspend his eight-month sentence for two years.
Corey was convicted by direction of Judge McCaffrey last month after he was rearraigned on charges of keeping and unlawful depositing of controlled waste and keeping it in a manner likely to cause pollution.
An earlier hearing was told that inspectors from the Northern Ireland Environment Agency first visited the site in August 2011 and found a whole raft of materials including both domestic and commercial waste and a number of skips.
Over the following number of years, visits found similar materials and in 2014, NIEA offices dug trial pits.
The various test holes uncovered a mixture of materials ranging from red brick, plastics, concrete, treated wood, fabrics, packaging, stones, carpets, electrics and textiles, and "lumps of other materials ... all mixed-up", and that it was estimated that over 4.5 tonnes of waste had been dumped at the site.
