A 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 McMillan, aged 31 and 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 Mr McMillan’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 Mr McMillan following taxation of the bus company’s costs at €44,227, together with Courts Act interest at the rate of 2% until Mr McMillan's debt is cleared.
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 Mr McMillan 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.
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.
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 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 including a dance routine to Shaggy's 'It wasn't me' on YouTube.
Nobody had been called to give any evidence to challenge Mr McMillan's claims before Judge Quinn said 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. Mr McMillan had not turned up in court to challenge Dublin Bus's application for the enforcement against him.
