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Biggest ever gold mine in British Isles worth £450million discovered in sleepy village

By James Tozer
Last updated at 7:07 PM on 01st July 2008

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It\'s enough to trigger a latter-day Klondike-style gold rush.

Prospectors yesterday claimed to have discovered the biggest gold reserve ever found in the British Isles deep beneath a small Irish village.

They said nearly half-a-billion pounds of the precious metal could lie beneath the rolling County Monaghan countryside and predicted that a mine could open in three years time.
Enlarge Clontibret

Clontibret, Co Monaghan, close to the Irish border, has more than one million ounces of gold

Ireland had its first gold rush as far back as 1795, and ever since then there have been efforts to find commercially-viable reserves.

But soaring world commodity prices, which have already resulted in efforts to revive a long-dormant Scottish gold mine, has convinced a tiny Dublin-based operation that it can succeed where others have failed.

The claims for the reserve have been made by Conroy Diamonds and Gold, the brainchild of former Irish senator and physiology lecturer Professor Richard Conroy.

A veteran explorer after decades spent searching for oil, gems and precious metals, he has long been convinced that beneath the village of Clontibret, close to the Northern Irish border, lies a massive amount of gold.
Enlarge Clontibret

Deposits could be worth as much as £450 million in Clontibret

Yesterday his firm unveiled a study by independent mining consultants estimating the total amount at just over a million ounces, making it the biggest ever found in Britain or Ireland.

With the price of gold now at around £450 an ounce, having more than trebled over the past six years, that would make the reserve worth up to £450million.

Amateur prospectors with visions of panning in local streams can think again, however - the most promising sites lie hundreds of feet underground, and Irish law means any flakes they did find would be property of the government there anyway.

And experts point out that the company\'s claims are broad estimates based on drilling and that most of the gold is of low-grade standard.

Even Professor Conroy admits that extracting the gold would cost around two-thirds of its total value, but he remains optimistic that commercial mining will happen.

\'A lot more work needs to be done, but I think we will go ahead, and if we do then it will be on a far bigger scale than any previous gold mine in Ireland or the UK,\' he said.

\'We have gone to the stage where we know there is a lot of gold in the area, but we still have to go through the stage of determining how economic it is going to be to mine it.\'

Set up in 1995, the professor\'s company has focused its attention on what it calls the Longford-Down Massif.

Its claims for the amount of gold beneath Clontibret are based on geological surveys, trench-digging and drilling.

Further exploration is now required to see whether Professor Conroy\'s company can attract the multi-million pound funding needed to start mining, however.

The lessons from Ireland\'s 18th century gold rush are not hopeful - after reports of finds in streams in County Wicklow in September 1795, hundreds of people converged to try their luck, but while one 22-ounce nugget was found, the frenzy quickly petered out.
gold

The declaration is expected to attract interest from major international players in the gold mining industry and raise hopes in the historically deprived border region

Across the Irish Sea, thousands of people worked in gold mines in North Wales in Victorian times, and Welsh gold was used to produce wedding rings for royal brides for decades, but that has dwindled to next-to-nothing.

But there are other signs of a revival - Scotland\'s Cononish gold mine, near the village of Tyndrum, could restart extraction as a result of the rise in commodity prices.

And Ireland already has one working gold mine, near Omagh, 30 miles from the spot targeted by Professor Conroy, where millions of pounds are being invested with the aim of producing 30,000 ounces a year.

Geologists mapping the island have said they would be \'very disappointed\' if significant finds of gold were not made, and with platinum deposits also predicted, several multinational firms are investigating.

But while the presence of at least some gold in Ireland is beyond dispute, it is a different story with the other riches promised by the name of Professor Conroy\'s company, diamonds - here, the focus is hundreds of miles away in Finland.


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Iren freuen sich über Goldminenfund
02.07.2008 | 13:00 Uhr | Rainer Hahn (EMFIS)

RTE - (www.rohstoffe-go.de) - Irische Geologen sind begeistert. In der Nähe der irischen Küste etwas außerhalb des verschlafenen Örtchens Clontibret im Bezirk Monaghan werden mehr als 1 Millionen Unzen an Gold vermutet. Dies wäre den Goldsuchern zufolge die bisher größte unerschlossene Goldmine in Irland und England.

Die Explorationsgesellschaft Conroy Diamonds and Gold glaubt, die Liegenschaft könnte mehr als 450 Mio. Pfund wert sein. Natürlich sind die Hoffnungen der Iren groß, dass nun ein neuer moderner Goldrausch stattfinden wird, der internationale Unternehmen und Investoren in die historisch sozial benachteiligte Region locken könnte.

Der hohe Goldpreis sorgte dafür, dass die Schottische Cononish-Mine in der Nähe von Tyndrum nach einem langen Dornröschenschlaf wieder eröffnet wurde. Die jetzigen Goldfunde sollen mehr als viermal so groß sein wie in Tyndrum. Trotz der niedrigen Goldgehalte soll sich der dortige Abbau ökonomisch lohnen, was die Iren natürlich freut.