Conroy glitters after gold find

SHARES in Conroy Diamonds and Gold rose 44% yesterday after the exploration company announced a possible gold find at its operation in Cavan.

Recent sampling work at the Slieve Glah prospecting area found two zones of unusual gold mineralisation patterns. The positive reports centred on an area 45km south-west of the gold belt linking counties Armagh and Monaghan, where Conroy has licences covering 1,500 square kilometres.

Chairman Richard Conroy said exploration work was still at a “very early stage.” “But results so far indicate there is excellent potential for another gold discovery,” said Professor Conroy.

Slieve Glah is one of three areas recently singled out by the company as having the potential for significant gold reserves, after commissioning an independent consultant’s report.

The report, which was published in September, found there could be up to 100,000 ounces of gold, worth in the region of €340 million, in the area under Conroy’s control.

That news caused the share price to jump 25% to 3.75p. By contrast, Conroy shares changed hands yesterday at 4.88p. But it remains short of the 5.5p peak reached in the first half of 2004.

The company’s work over the winter consisted of sampling a target area at Slieve Glah that was 100 metres long and 100 metres wide. Approximately 80 samples of rock were removed from the area and examined in detail.

“This sampling technique has been successfully employed by the company to trace bedrock sources for large gold in soil anomalies at other locations in the Longford-Down Massif, most notably at the company’s recent discovery at Glenish in Co Monaghan,” the company said.

The company said most occurrences of gold mineralisation that it had discovered so far were similar in nature to the samples announced yesterday. It has also reported positive signs from its work in the nearby areas of Tullybuck-Lisglassan and Cargalisgorran.

The company was set up in 1995 after Prof Conroy, a former senator and physiology lecturer at Dublin’s Royal College of Surgeons, left oil exploration company Arcon, where he had held the roles of chairman and chief executive.