The High Court awarded a Luas passenger €500 in nominal damages after finding that a security guard briefly defamed him by repeatedly directing him to leave a tram, despite his valid ticket and without conduct justifying his removal. The court said a colleague’s prompt intervention corrected the impression and there was no lasting damage to the passenger’s reputation.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Barr on 12 December 2019, concerned an incident on 8 June 2016. The passenger, Leon Diop, was travelling with his brother from Middle Abbey Street towards Tallaght. Two security guards employed by STT Risk Management Limited boarded at Blackhorse. The defendants were Transdev Dublin Light Rail and STT Risk Management Limited.
The passenger said the guards approached him and his brother for their tickets. After he remarked that the inspection was “slightly racially profiling”, one guard, Mr Burke, repeatedly told them to leave and gestured towards the doors. The other guard, Mr Fay, then said they could stay. The defendants denied targeting the brothers and denied that the exchange was defamatory.
The court preferred the passenger’s evidence, supported by his brother’s, that the ticket request came before his remark about racial profiling. CCTV showed no exchange between Burke and a young man leaving the tram as Burke boarded. The judge described Burke’s account of telling that man to get off as a lie intended to justify the ticket inspection. The court found the passenger had remained calm and had not breached the travel bye-laws.
The judge held that asking passengers to show tickets was not defamatory, and that the guards could respond to the passenger’s accusation. But after establishing that he had a valid ticket and was not misbehaving, Burke had no right to direct him off the tram. The order and accompanying gestures could lead other passengers to think he lacked a valid ticket or had misbehaved. The judge found that this was a breach of contract and defamation. Qualified privilege did not cover those later directions.
The court also found that Fay’s intervention came before the brothers stood up and made clear they could remain. It therefore treated the defamation as fleeting and almost immediately expunged, and declined to make a substantial damages award. It rejected the defendants’ submission that the passenger’s later Facebook post should reduce damages to zero, and awarded €500. The judge was not satisfied that Burke had called the passenger a “cunt”. The court expressly did not decide whether the ticket inspection amounted to racial profiling or unlawful discrimination; the action before it concerned defamation.