A Co Dublin sales assistant and online dancer with thousands of followers on TikTok and You Tube, who lost a €60,000 damages claim against Dublin Bus, has been ordered to pay the company’s €44,000 legal costs bill.
Sean McMillan, (31) of Ashgrove, The Baskins, Cloughran, has been directed to pay the debt off at the rate of €50 a week. It will take him almost 20 years to do so.
At the Circuit Civil Court two years ago, Judge Cormac Quinn threw out his personal injuries claim and 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 Mr McMillan’s evidence by then Dublin Bus solicitor Gerard O’Herlihy.
Sean Coleman, a solicitor with Arthur McLean Solicitors who now represent Dublin Bus, has now successfully obtained an enforcement order against Mr McMillan for €44,227.
During the 2023 trial, Mr McMillan 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 the dancer 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.”
Mr McMillan denied lying to his doctors, the doctors of three defendants in the case or to the court.
Judge Quinn had been shown Mr McMillan dancing and doing squats and flips in videos which he had put up on his various social media accounts.
Judge Quinn stated he had “seen and heard enough” before dismissing the €60,000 claim.
Mr McMillan 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 Mr McMillan from his seat.
During the case, barrister Frank Martin, counsel for Suttle Landscapes, told Mr McMillan 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 Mr McMillan that his own GP thought he was a “chancer” and had given him no treatment in relation to his alleged back injuries.
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