There’s gold in them thar’ hills of Northern Ireland
WORK on a gold mine in Northern Ireland is set to begin soon, after a mining firm won planning consent to dig for up to £100million of the precious metal.
Stock Market-listed Galantas Gold has carried out studies which it says show there is up to 500,000 troy ounces of gold at the site in Omagh, County Tyrone.
Of those, 180,000 ounces are ‘indicated’ – meaning their quality and quantity are ascertained with a degree of certainty – though some sources believe it could find as much as 3million ounces.
The mine will be the first big underground gold mine in Ireland, the firm said. It operated an open-cast gold mine in Omagh that ceased production in 2013 as the price of gold fell from a record high and the quality of its ore declined.
The new, underground mine is beneath the opencast mine. So far, Galantas has focused on two veins in its testing there, but believes considerably more gold may be present.
‘We have a lot of veins that have barely been touched,’ said Roland Phelps, president and chief executive of Galantas, which became involved in mining in Ulster in the 1990s.
‘We have been working towards this for years.
‘We aim to raise the cash to begin mining from a range of sources, including loans and equity finance, and we think we can break the back of that in the next three months.’
Now that planning permission has been granted by Northern Ireland Environment Minister Mark Durkan, the firm expects to create hundreds of jobs at the mine in the long term.
‘The underground mine will use the same processing methods as the open-cast mine, which had excellent environmental standards,’ said Phelps.
He also expected the underground mine, like the open-cast mine, to contain deposits of silver and lead.