Mr Jack Ronan, who plans to build an incinerator in South Tipperary, has told the High Court that his family has been subjected to a vicious campaign of intimidation by anti-incinerator lobbyists.
He told Mr Justice Aindreas O Caoimh he firmly believed the campaign was substantially financed by the Coolmore and associated stud farms jointly owned by Mr Aidan O'Brien, and the Magnier family.
Mr O'Brien, of Rosegreen, Cashel, told the court he believed the health of his family and local residents would be put at risk if animal waste company, National By Products Ltd, was allowed to build the incinerator next to his 600-acre Ballydoyle stud.
He is asking the court to allow him to legally challenge planning permission granted for the €25 million development by South Tipperary County Council.
Mr Ronan, of Orchardstown, Clonmel, said his company and family had been subjected to a most extraordinarily intensive local and national campaign through television, radio, newspapers, posters and advertisements.
He said they had been subjected to "a deeply personalised and expensively orchestrated campaign of invective, intimidation and interference" which included surveillance of his property.
"I firmly believe this has occurred or has been caused, either directly or indirectly, with the financial support and active participation and encouragement of the applicants and their associates," he said.
The campaign had brought much suffering and had turned a large section of the community against all of them and the company, extending to its employees and their families. "I have felt threatened, ostracised and isolated by the talk and whispering it has generated," he said.
Mr Ronan said his company processed offal, bone, fat and blood from slaughter houses and butchers and was licensed to handle an annual throughput of up to 250,000 tonnes of selected animal by-products.
Since the BSE regulations introduced last year there was a huge stockpile of up to 250,000 tonnes of meat and bonemeal in storage awaiting destruction. The meat and bonemeal mountain was building by 150,000 tonnes a year, and the cost to the State was estimated at €50 million a year because it had to be exported to Europe for incineration there.
Mr Ronan denied that the development would become the national centre for the disposal by incineration of risk material and said it was untrue to suggest the new plant was likely to be a location for or transmitter of BSE. No by-products from BSE-positive animals would be accepted on the site.
He said assertions by the anti-incinerator lobby that the installation would be used to burn certain industrial waste was simply untrue.