Arcon announces 'outstanding' results from Galmoy mine

Arcon International Resources PLC announced the third set of outstanding results from the exploration drilling programme within the mining area of its Galmoy zinc mine in Ireland.

The latest holes show that this high grade zone lies around 200 metres to the southeast of the current CW South orebody and the intersections have higher zinc values than those in the previous two sets of results, the group said.

"These results suggest that the potential resource here is much bigger than we thought initially," said chief executive Kevin Ross.

The weighted average intersection zinc grade at 27.9% is more than double the average grade on the CW ore body of 12.8% zinc.

The weighted average grades of 9.3% lead and 58g/t silver are significantly higher than has previously been identified in the Galmoy Block.

"We believe that the zinc grades from this drilling programme are the highest recorded in Ireland," Ross said. "This deposit is still open and we believe we have added substantial resource to the current reserve base which will extend the life of the mine by approximately five years to 2012.

"It will also allow us to reduce our production costs quite significantly and put us in a very strong position with the expected upturn in the zinc price cycle in 2003/4," he added.

Drilling on two gravity anomalies to the east of this area is likely to commence during the second quarter 2003, Ross said.