Conroy’s Cavan prospect glitters

Irish mining company Conroy Gold & Natural Resources has made a further significant gold discovery at a prospect in Co Cavan.

The Dublin-headquartered company announced yesterday that assay results at Slieve Glah enlarged the size of its existing two gold targets and found two new targets. The two new targets are both over three kilometres in length. The assay results showed a range of four-to-over-300 parts of gold per billion soil particles.

The significance of those figures is that in Ireland, anything over 10 units is considered “highly anomalous” in soil samples and typically proves positive for gold-in-bedrock during follow-up drilling.

Company chairman Richard Conroy called the latest results exciting “not only to the prospectivity of the very large targets at Slieve Glah, but also to the entire 30-mile gold trend, which the company has discovered; all of which lies within the company’s licence area”.

Last December, Conroy increased its nationwide footprint with the receipt of seven prospecting licences across Tipperary, Clare and Kilkenny. In May, the company raised nearly €4m in funding from a share placing.

The company said the seven new licence areas contain similar geology to its chief areas of interest in Monaghan and Armagh. Conroy hopes to build Ireland’s first commercial gold mine at Clontibret, Co Monaghan, over the next two-to-three years. Recently-revised resource estimates for the site upped amounts by 20% to 600,000 ounces, which the company said had “transformed” the economics of the prospect.