Louis Moriarty and his waste company, Swacliffe Ltd, have been at the centre of a series of investigations and court cases into some of the worst cases of illegal dumping ever uncovered in the State.
Mr Moriarty has already pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing in relation to his involvement in one illegal site, while the clean-up of another site has cost him millions of euro in legal and other costs.
The businessman, who lives on Griffith Avenue close to Mr Ahern, did not return phone calls yesterday from The Irish Times. Mr Moriarty is now in property development and no longer involved in waste management.
Originally from Sneem, Co Kerry, by the 1990s Mr Moriarty and his wife, Eileen, had built up one of the country's most successful waste companies in the country, which looked after the waste of hundreds of businesses and organisations, including a number of hospitals in the capital.
With a base close to Gardiner Street, Dublin, Swacliffe Ltd - trading as Dublin Waste - collected hundreds of tonnes of waste every week and was authorised to dump it at licensed sites in north Dublin and Co Kildare.
By 2000 waste was becoming a costly business. Strict new European licensing requirements for landfills had caused the closure of hundreds of substandard sites around the country, which in turn had seen the fees charged by licensed dumps rise sharply from less than £10 per tonne to more than £50 per tonne in some cases. Illegal dumping became potentially very lucrative.
From the late 1990s Swacliffe was being investigated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) amid suspicions it was involved in illegal dumping and in early 2001, the agency began proceedings over the company's failure to account for 25,000 tonnes of waste it had collected. Mr Moriarty and his wife, as directors, were fined £9,200 and ordered to pay a further £8,840 in costs.
By September of that year officials from Wicklow County Council had begun a major investigation into suspected illegal-dumping sites in the county. In October staff uncovered one field at Coolnamadra, near the Glen of Imaal in the west of the county, where they discovered over 8,000 tonnes of illegal waste.
Investigators soon established that much of the material was hazardous hospital waste, which was traced back to two hospitals, the Mater public hospital and the Blackrock Clinic, which both used Dublin Waste and which said they had assurances it was being properly disposed of.
Later that month officials discovered illegal waste at an old quarry at Whitestown, north of Baltinglass. It soon emerged as the largest illegal dump site ever uncovered in the country, with estimates putting the amount of waste at 250,000 tonnes.
A criminal investigation, headed by the Garda National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, was launched into all of the major illegal dumping sites, involving a team of detectives. It was the first major criminal investigation into suspected environmental crime undertaken in the State.
In late 2001, Wicklow County Council began High Court proceedings against Swacliffe and the Moriartys over the Coolnamadra site, which resulted in a High Court order to them to oversee the clean-up of the site. It was the first case of its kind here.
The EPA also brought successful proceedings in 2002 to order Dublin Waste to cease all waste management operations.