A High Court judge has pleaded with Specsavers and the co-owner of its Ennis store to call off a “war” between the parties that involves a litany of legal cases.
The cases involve allegations of multimillion euro tax evasion and of criminality over expenses, use of artificial intelligence (AI) for legal submissions and complaints about the use of bikini photographs of a champion-Irish sprinter.
The legal actions centre on Sean Power, a 28-year-old director and co-owner of the Ennis Specsavers store in Co Clare.
Power alleges he has been wrongly targeted by the company after he assisted the Rathmines, Dublin, branch of Specsavers handle an investigation by Ireland Specsavers Ltd, the Irish arm of the €4 billion global retail giant whose headquarters are in Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
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Power, whose mother also runs Specsavers stores in Limerick, was on course to take on a second outlet in Cork before he fell out with the company. Specsavers concedes his Ennis store makes “hundreds of thousands of euro profits” each year and is “extremely successful”.
Among the complaints that Power has made is that Specsavers is allegedly involved in tax evasion by transferring to a Guernsey bank account millions of euro collected from Irish stores for marketing.
Power claims that a 5 per cent charge on turnover for each store that is supposed to be ring-fenced for marketing was instead used to pay a €81 million dividend to an entity in Guernsey controlled by Specsavers founders Doug and Mary Perkins.
Specsavers denies any impropriety and alleges that Power has wrongly used his access to Specsavers’ internal systems to download large amounts of confidential financial information that he has misrepresented to others.
Specsavers alleges Power started making complaints after an investigation was launched into the Ennis store in late 2024 that raised concerns about claimed expenses of €27,000.
Among the concerns raised by this report were expenses relating to an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event in Manchester, a flight from Florida to London, Ticketmaster expenditure and expenses paid to Ciara Neville, who is one of Ireland’s top sprinters and is Power’s girlfriend.
Power denies any wrongdoing and said he paid for the UFC expense.
Frank Clarke, the former chief justice, was retained by Specsavers as an independent adjudicator to assess the concerns about expenses, but his investigation is on hold due to the legal cases.
The cases were heard – and the allegations and counter-allegations aired – over four days in the High Court before Judge Micheál D O’Connell in recent weeks with the last hearing on Wednesday.
This was a preliminary hearing in advance of a full trial, which both parties say they hope will begin in July.
Specsavers is seeking an order to prevent Power retaining what it says are trade secrets that he wrongfully downloaded.
It is also seeking an order compelling Power and his business partner John O’Farrell to sell their shares for €956,000 each, which it says it is entitled to do under their shareholder agreement.
Power, who has secured injunctions in the Circuit Court preventing his removal by Specsavers, says he is a whistleblower who has made protected disclosures and cannot be punished for his actions. He has made 61 claimed protected disclosures.
Power has complained that Specsavers raised concerns about payments to Neville, who works in his store, as a way of intimidating him. He claims that issues were also raised about the employment of the wife of his business partner, O’Farrell, and O’Farrell’s 18-year-old daughter.
Power complained that Specsavers trawled Neville’s Instagram account and needlessly introduced into court filings photographs of her in a bikini.
Power, who is representing himself in the litigation between the parties, complained that Neville was “singled out” by Specsavers as someone who was “criminally given a gift card”. He said the allegations were unfounded as Neville had worked for Ennis Specsavers since November 2023.
The Ennis manager read out a letter he wrote last August to Specsavers’ owners, Doug and Mary Perkins, and their son John, who is the chief executive of the optician chain, complaining about Specsavers introducing photographs of Neville in her bikini into evidence.
“What was done to Ciara Neville was not just inappropriate, it was degrading and morally indefensible,” he said.
He wrote, in a letter read out in court, that instead of Neville being celebrated for becoming the Irish 100m champion in 2025, “her body was used as a weapon by a senior member of this business in a court of law, without notice, relevance or decency”.
He complained that images of Neville were taken from her Instagram from a time before she worked for Specsavers. Pictures were also taken from the Instagram account of her friend Sharlene Mawdsley, an Irish 400m runner.
Marcus Dowling, for the Specsavers companies, said pictures of Neville were gathered by a professional company in a forensic way to show that when she was supposed to be working “it seemed that she was a full-time athlete and abroad”.
The barrister said there was “a narrative, a series of dates and social media posts to back up those dates”. He said Neville “has a public profile, she is a public figure”.
Specsavers complained that Power contacted thousands of Specsavers partners across Ireland and the UK by email to allege that the company was wrongly charging customers for certain tests. Power claimed his position was confirmed by the Department of Social Protection.
One email he sent, exhibited in the court case, said Specsavers’ practice “could wrongfully expose every partner and store in the country with severe consequences”.
Specsavers accused Power of being prepared to “mislead and distort information to support his false claims”. It said none of his allegations was correct.
Dowling told the court Specsavers’ relationship with Power “has become completely untenable” because “he continuously makes allegations of dishonesty against people in circumstances where there is just no basis for them”.
“He is absolutely rogue. He will say anything,” Dowling said.
He complained that Power had used artificial intelligence (AI) tools to prepare his cases.
“So instead of dealing with an issue when he is confronted with objective reality, his AI spews out a pile of other arguments,” Dowling told the court.
“He just doesn’t engage with the specifics of issues when his version of reality hits actual reality.”
Dowling said AI led Power to wrongly attribute a statement made by someone else at a board meeting to himself.
The case finished on Wednesday with both sides giving undertakings to maintain the status quo in advance of a full trial.
Power told the court he had “no ill will against Specsavers”.
“There’s been a lot of mistakes. I think we have been treated horrifically,” he said. “A few bad players don’t make it a bad team.”
Judge O’Connell called the dispute “a war” and advised both sides to try mediation, even though he knew previous attempts failed. He said the relationship between the Ennis branch and the company was “toxic”.
“This whole case, no matter what way it goes, it is a tragedy, and I think that there is obviously a lot of pride on both sides at this stage,” he said.
“I don’t know why we are talking about matters in Guernsey and what not. This should be about a shop in Ennis that’s doing very well.”
