Just a short note. I have been quite busy. I am researching the back story around Africa’s richest and longest producing goldmine. I first visited this gold mine in 1990.
I have ordered a book from Amazon on the life of Tiny Rowland. That should be a clue. The price was a penny. It will cost me to £5.71 after postage and packing. I first want to write a short piece on a small historic silver-rich lead mine. It is within Group Eleven’s new Castlemaine zinc-lead exploration ground in southwest Ireland. It is first mentioned in reports dating back to 1497.
I am getting excited about Group Eleven and now busy trying to raise some initial financing. Ignore the negativity in the markets and the fretting about instability. G11 is a private company and I have high hopes for it in these times of comic capitulation in the sector. The markets are too important to be taken seriously. Throw charts and myopic predictions right out the window. It is all about sentiment and emotion and fragile confidence.
Confidence like trust is not hard to break. It can be shaken but not stirred. Once stirred it creates its own momentum. The suction downward is quick as we saw in China. Glencore might submerge beneath £1 per share but the demand for metals will not. Without exploration what will remain are mines we already knew. We mine these tired deposits at anaemic grades. To mine we will need higher not lower than normal metal prices. At that stage the usual suspects will offer unusual prospects. It will then take ten years for the mining sector to get back on its feet and meet demand with supply.
© John P. Barry (P.Geo)
John P. Barry
Managing Director of Irus Consulting Ltd. and Professional Geologist
A widely travelled and highly experienced economic geologist, John Barry is a confidential counsellor to the likely investor contemplating a considerable investment in the intricate business of mining metals. Dont take a flyer and trust altogether in luck and invest your money in an exploration or mining project on the strength of a printed prospectus or the advice of an interested friend without the preliminary investigation and site visit of a reliable geologist with a basic grasp of commerical reality. Irus Consulting provides strategic and practical management advice and guidance to its clients. Time is a precious commodity for my clients, and indeed myself, as it relentlessly ebbs away and so I try as best I can to avoid the mediocre - those projects and their champions which do not engender enthusiastic belief and passion.
Irus Services Include:
- High-level strategic advice
- Practical guidance and assistance on project sourcing, acquisition and implementation
- Rapid identification of key project value-drivers and potential fatal flaws.
- Capacity building and coordination of external consultants.
- Design and targeting of effective marketing campaigns
John Barry was part of very small teams which discovered and sourced several multi-million ounce gold deposits in Africa. He has worked as an economic geologist since 1988 and as a consultant and then responding to the entrepreneurial spirit he was a founder and manager of three public resource companies which raised a total of US$70million. These resource companies are currently successfully exploring and developing gold and base metal projects in Europe, and sub-Sahara Africa. John has seen a lot of rocks working for consultancies such as CSA in both Ireland and Australia and as Senior Associate Geologist with Chlumsky Armbrust & Meyer LLC which is based in Denver. He is a specialist in zin-lead exploration and in 1992 joined the exploration team which discovered the Lisheen zinc-lead deposit in Ireland as the resource was being expanded in the first couple of years after discovery and in 2008 led the first non Polish exploration company to successfully enter and acquire a major resource-project in the Upper Silesian Mississippi-Valley-Type (MVT) zinc-lead district in southern Poland the worlds largest minerlised district of its kind. John (P.Geo and EurGeol) holds a Masters Degree in Geology from Pennsylvania State University and a MBA from the Edinburgh School of Business, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland.
I would like to think that I have shown the tenacity, patience and focus required to implement many of my better ideas over the years and that I have learned valuable lessons from some failures. I believe one of my strengths is in communicating quite complex technical ideas in a concrete way that can be easily understood. I am a team- builder and motivator by projecting my enthusiasm and vision for a project. I am committed to the development of young geologists through supportive delegation. John is now moving more from managing public companies to freelance consultancy and a more advisory role so as to concentrate increasingly on assisting management in effective exploration and discovery. He is Managing Director of his own Exploration Management and Geological Consultancy: Irus Consulting Ltd. Please visit www.irusconsulting.com for more information and free newsletter registration.
John is now moving more from managing public companies to freelance consultancy and a more advisory role so as to concentrate increasingly on assisting management in effective exploration and discovery. He is MD of his own Exploration Management and Geological Consultancy Irus Consulting Ltd.
Click here to download Johns Statement of Qualifications as a PDF