As a young boy peddling his bicycle along the meandering roads between Dublin and his mother’s home in the Irish countryside, Professor Richard Conroy would know when he’d reached half way when the black road tar suddenly took on a reddish tinge.

No-one knew it at the time, but the local council had been building their roads using pyrites from what would become Europe’s largest zinc mine at Navan. Years later, Prof. Conroy’s childhood memories and local knowledge became central to another major zinc discovery and what looks to be the largest ever gold discovery in the British Isles.


Professor Richard Conroy, Chairman of Conroy Diamonds and Gold plc

While Prof. Conroy is a medical man at heart, his fascination with Ireland’s long history of natural resources has kept him busy for nearly 40 years. Today, he heads AIM listed Conroy Diamonds and Gold plc, which has just brought in mining consultants to take a closer look at the company’s flagship project.

Prof. Conroy believes his team has hit upon a gold mining camp that stretches 30 miles along the Orlock Bridge fault, straddling Northern and Southern Ireland. Already, it has a confirmed 1 million ounce gold resource at Clontibret – one of three main discoveries there. The expectation is that there could be a lot more to go at, particularly at the nearby Clay Lake and Glenish deposits.

Irish exploration

Gold exploration is a far cry from Prof. Conroy’s early career in physiology, where he led a lot of the early research into the effects of how the body’s circadian rhythms are affected by the likes of shift work and jet lag. Later, he played a part in Irish politics, acting as a Senator in Parliament and at various times was the spokesman for foreign affairs, Northern Ireland, health and education. For a time he was also the Mayor of his local town, Dunleary.

But medicine and politics aside, Prof. Conroy, together with his MD Maureen Jones and FD James Jones, have punched above their weight in some notable exploration activity in Ireland and around the world – and it all started with oil.

In 1974, Prof. Conroy was behind the start up of Trans-International Oil, which got involved with a consortium of major players including Mobil, Amoco and DSM and which was the first group to see oil shows in the Irish offshore waters of the fastnet basin. A change in focus towards hard rock in the 1980s saw Conroy Petroleum and Natural Resources pull off the discovery of what would eventually become Ireland’s first new zinc mine in 20 years at Galmoy.

“We knew there was this huge zinc discovery in Ireland and we thought that if there was one large zinc current at Navan – which comes to the surface like a rugby ball – there must be other currents that were maybe deeper down,” Prof. Conroy said. “But we were told we were wasting our time – all the majors had been in and if there was anything to find they would have found it.

“Now, no disrespect to major companies but they are always under pressure of time. In research and exploration, one of the things you need is time to reflect. What we did was to use geochemistry and a little bit more emphasis on geophysics over many years to end up making a major discovery.”

Gold currents

With the development of Galmoy well underway by the mid-1990s, Prof. Conroy and his team turned their attention to Ireland’s mining past for their next project. “I knew as a youngster that gold had been discovered in an old antimony mine and there had been a little bit of excitement for a while, which had faded away. So we decided to have a serious look to see if we could find gold currents in Ireland – in places where we had a reasonable chance of developing them.”

While the excitement around the disused antinomy mine at Clontibret had spurred a string of explorers from as far away as Canada to try their luck at repeating the gold finds in the surrounding area, they all failed. It was a situation that Prof. Conroy reckons needed the care and attention of a small exploration group.

“At the end of the day, if you are running a exploration company you have to use your imagination and ask why it is it that you can compete with the majors,” he said. “You have to take a slightly different view or see something, or have a bit more time because you are not going to compete in terms of finance or personnel or databases. There has to be something slightly different that you can bring and at the same time it must stand up.”

On closer inspection, the trouble at Clontibret appeared to be in recovering core samples from the ground. On receipt of a license, the company applied triple-barreled drilling and some chemical additive in order to improve the recovery – it worked.

“Initially, we felt there was something at Clontibret and last year we showed that we had a 1 million ounce resource,” Prof. Conroy said. “But it is a different sort of structure, there is a huge fault running through it called the Orlock Bridge. Again, I knew that over a hundred years ago there were a number of lead mines there, mostly very small, but some of them were quite large. So there was a largely forgotten mining history there and that was an encouraging sign.”

The Conroy team were then faced with figuring out whether Clontibret was a one-off occurrence or whether this large structure – the Orlock Bridge fault with a number of north/south vertical faults – could be home to other gold deposits.

“For several years we worked on this and now we are looking at a mining camp, a series of mines,” he said. “It took us a long time and there were moments when we thought we were wasting our time, but it gradually started to come together.

With a firmed up 1 million ounce resource at Clontibret and encouraging geochemistry and rock chip sampling at Clay Lake and Glenish, the company is now making moves to take the project to the next stage – a scoping study.

“Now they do say that many a good anomaly has been spoiled by drilling it, so we took a very close look before reporting it,” Prof. Conroy said. “We’re seeing a stretch of about seven miles, with Clontibret in the middle, Clay Lake about three and a half mile north and another discovery at Glenish, three and a half miles the other way.

“We have brought in North American company Wardrop who will not just be working on the basis of doing a scoping study for Clontibret, but looking at it in an overall context.”

For Prof. Conroy, the move marks a new chapter in nearly ten years of exploration on the project. He concedes that it would be obvious for the company to be in talks with prospective partners over developing the project, but for the time being there seems to be little fear over continuing to go it alone.

“That is the thing about exploration – you try to succeed, you try to reduce the risks,” he said. “There are questions about whether it will be economic, where do you focus, when do you bring in a joint venture company. The odds are against you, if they weren’t then everyone would be doing exploration. So if you are a small group you have to ask how you can reduce those odds and get the maximum value for what is being spent. The rewards are great when you are successful.”

Ben Hobson, SmallCapNews