A Co Dublin sales assistant and online dancer with thousands of followers on TikTok and YouTube, who lost a €60,000 damages claim against Dublin Bus, has been ordered to pay the bus company’s €44,000 legal costs bill.
Sean Mc Millan, (31) of Ashgrove, The Baskins, Cloughran, has been directed to pay it off at the rate of €50 a week and it will take him almost 20 years to do so.
The Circuit Civil Court threw out his personal injuries claim two years ago when Judge Cormac Quinn also ordered him to pay the costs of his failed case.
Judge Quinn stopped the trial after stating he had “heard enough” during a forensic cross-examination of Mc Millan’s evidence by former Dublin Bus solicitor Gerard O’Herlihy.
Sean Coleman, a solicitor with Arthur McLean Solicitors who now represent Dublin Bus, has successfully obtained an enforcement order against McMillan following taxation of the bus company’s costs at €44,227, together with Courts Act interest at the rate of two per cent until McMillan’s debt is cleared.
During the 2023 trial, Mc Millan denied he had defrauded the Department of Social Welfare out of very large sums of money.
Judge Quinn had been told by Mr O’Herlihy that Mc Millan had received €35,000 of social welfare from the time he had fallen from a seat on a bus in January 2016 until the date of the trial.
Mr O’Herlihy put it to him that he had defrauded the social welfare department by claiming disability benefit “when clear evidence from his own online dance videos revealed he had not been disabled in any way. Mc Millan denied lying to his doctors, the doctors of three defendants in the case or to the court.
Mc Millan had also been ordered to pay the costs of two other defendants Suttle Landscapes, Clontarf, Dublin, and of Deirdre Fairbrother, Estuary road, Malahide, Co Dublin, the driver of Suttle’s vehicle that had allegedly caused the bus to brake suddenly and throw Mc Millan from his seat.
Barrister Frank Martin, counsel for Suttle Landscapes, told him he appeared like “Mr Wobbly” on the bus following an incident in which cctv showed that no other passenger had been affected by the bus’s sudden stop.
Mr Martin, who had appeared with Tormeys Solicitors, put it to him that his own GP thought he was a chancer and had given him no treatment in relation to his alleged back injuries.
Judge Wuinn had been shown Mc Millan dancing and doing squats and flips in videos, which he had put up on his various social media accounts including a dance routine to Shaggy’s “It wasn’t me” on YouTube.
No-one had been called to give any evidence to challenge Mc Millan’s claims before Judge Quinn got tired of the case and stated he had “seen and heard enough” before dismissing the €60,000 claim.
It is not known if any of the other defendants followed up on the costs order in their favour. Mc Millan had not turned up in court to challenge Dublin’Bus’s application for the enforcement against him.
