Boom in Navan—the zinc-edged investment

Richard Hall

Last month a series of explosions that will change the future of Ireland took place near the small town of Navan, County Meath. They had nothing to do with the Provos, or with Mr Whitelaw's labours north of the border. But the political repercussions have been loud enough to rival the usual talking-points in Dublin bars.

The explosions were set off by a team of hard-hatted Canadians, 2,500 feet down a steep incline shaft. After four months of burrowing they had reached the richest zinclead orebody in Europe — and possibly in the world. The mine is already said to be worth more than £2,000 million, and drilling has not yet explored its full reserves. The thought of such wealth under the meadows of Navan fires the blood of the Irish, the poorest nation in the EEC. Accustomed to exporting butter, Guinness and people, they have visions of sudden affluence. Extra excitement has been generated by geologists, who say that if one Navan exists there must surely be more awaiting discovery in sleepy corners of the republic. There are other mines in production in Ireland, but the size of Navan dwarfs them all. The ore is 80 per cent zinc, which is used in cars, dustbins and all manner of household goods. The price of zinc has been soaring up lately on the London Metal Exchange to £700 a ton.

The urgent question about this unsuspected treasure trove is brief but vexatious: who owns it? The issue has split the Irish Labour Party wide open. The party is in a government coalition with the conservative Fine Gael, and its contortions to embrace both socialist faith and political expediency are looking more than ever unnatural as the Navan controversy hots up. Irish left-wingers are crying for outright nationalisation of the Mine immediately.

accuse the six Labour Ministers in the Coalition of treacherously "selling out to international capitalism." One Minister who has been forced to stay silent — which is not his wont — is Dr Conortruise O'Brien. The fiercest campaigner for a Navan takeover now is Senator Dr Noel Browne, who has a considerable public following. When he was Minister of Health, twenty years ago, he put through a programme which wiped out TB in Ireland. Today he is gaunt, grey-haired and uncompromising — a Gaelic Michael Foot — and he has made the "mines fight" his vendetta against O'Brien and other erstwhile Labour comrades.

Forty branches of the "Irish Resources Protection Campaign" have sprung up, and the republic's TV service even sent a team all the way to Zambia, to see how President Kenneth Kaunda had taken control of his country's copper mines. The resulting film, shown on November 22, strongly implied that Dr Kaunda has a thing or two to teach the men in the Dail, and fostered the thought that radicals might be lurking somewhere in the Donnybrook studios. Rather awkwardly for the left, the four men controlling Tara, the company that made the big find at Navan, are all Irish down to their brog‘ies. They emigrated a generation ago to Canada, to work as builders' labourers, moved into mining, struck it lucky, then came back to their birthplace in the 'sixties to risk their wealth in prospecting.

The romantic success story of the four — Pat Hughes, Matt Gilroy, Mike McCarthy and Joe McParland — has been made much of by their public relations men. It is more grist to the PRO mill that the Navan exploring concession was taken over by the quartet after Rio-Tinto Zinc had abandoned it as worthless The task of the nationalisation lobby in Dublin would have been much easier with Sr Val Duncan in the role of ruthless exploiter. As it is, Pat Hughes and his colleagues are roughly dismissed as 'gombeen' (moneygrubbing) tools of big business.

The man with the painful task of cutting through this jungle of invective and actually taking a decision is Mr Justice Keating, the rotund Minister of Commerce and Industry. Before gaining office, in the Labour third of the Cabinet, he was a confident and popular TV personality. He is less confident now. But with the news from Navan that the Canadian shaft-sinkers have actually hit the orebody, he must act soon.

The company has already spent about £3 million on prospecting and development. It threatens that unless it can do a deal soon for a mining lease, operations will have to stop for lack of funds. This is treated with scep ticism — borrowing cannot be that hard when you are sitting on a deposit that can give 200,000 tons of zinc a year. The company retorts that it cannot raise funds with a takeover feared. Mr Keating's worry is knowing who to believe. The company has been at pains to play down the Navan find, saying it is worth a mere £600 million. It asserts that the mine's zinc exports will only be about £25 million a year — petty enough when set against total Irish exports of twenty times that.

The nationalisation lobby accuses the company of 'knocking' its own property so that it can screw generous tax terms from the Government, then have a bonanza. It hints that the orebody is far bigger than so far revealed, and demands to know why the mine . plans to sell concentrate to Europe, rather than refining the zinc in Ireland and making finished goods from it.

The company answers that cannot afford to build a £40 million smelter until it can bring the mine into production. The potential profits should not be exaggerated, furthermore . . . But this 'low profile' strategy is not entirely convincing — if the Navan lease is granted on terms the shareholders hope for, a speculative buy will turn into a very solid, zinc-edged investment.

When I drove the tairty miles from Dublin to Navan last month, I found no hint of gloom. The Canadians had just been blasting again, and brown smoke swirled from the portals of the shaft. After the air had cleared we began a long trudge down to the face, whew giant rock shovels were moving the debris of the latest explosion. Members of the crew hacked loose rock from the roof of the shaft.

These men care nothing for the political squabble that pursues their advance into the Navan orebody. Like the oil rig operators, or pilots who fly relief supplies into war zones, they earn their money by courage and skill. The next job could be on the far side of the globe.

The miners had few feelings about Navan, except that it is hardly humming with life.

The town has been making furniture and carpets for two centuries, and while plentifully equipped with pubs, has no hotel. So the Tara management prefabricated an hotel within sight of the mine headgear, which looms over the flat fields of County Meath.

Soon Navan will have its boom. The mine will employ a thousand men, who with their families may almost double the town's 5,000 population. The mine will also stimulate much 'spin-off' business, and the price of houses is already creeping up, as when the first oil strikes sent a wave of adrenalin through Aberdeen.

The effects of the North Sea discoveries have been watched intently by Irish poli ticians. Left-wingers think the oil companies had it too easy in Scotland, and charge that mining 'exploiters' offer the same challenge to national interest and honour in Ireland. Like oil, minerals are a 'wasting asset.'

The socialists point to how Norway took control of the wells in its own section of the North Sea. Norwegian experts have been making their appearance in Dublin in recent weeks.

"We're not a developing country, to be robbed of our natural resources," say students at Trinity College. "After thirty years they'll leave us with only a hole in the ground." The Irish Union of Students recently brought out a 25-page manifesto called 'What's Mined is Ours! The case for the retention and development of Irish minerals under public ownership.'

A leader of the university agitation for immediate seizure of Navan is Milo Rockett, a 25-year-old economist from Kilkenny. His hair hangs halfway to his waist, he speaks with the argot of the political underground, and when I met him he had just returned from a spell of arcane research in New York. The Rockett formula is simple: "Expropriate the mineral resources without compensation."

He thinks there could also be a political bonus, in the struggle for Irish unity. If Navan and other mines like it can be developed to give new strength to the republic's economy, then people in Ulster may look more readily at the idea of switching loyalties to the South.

If the Irish Cabinet has no shortage of vociferous advisers from outside its ranks, it has almost nobody to call on in the civil service to solve this multi-million pound dilemma. The mining section at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce consists of two elderly officials, neither of whom has any mining qualifications.

Sadly enough, the Government has lost the guidance of Murrogh O'Brien, formerly Ireland's Director of Geological Survey. He has changed hats and gone to Navan — to become executive vice-president of Tara Exploration and Development.

He adds a certain poise to the direction of affairs in the company. The four founders, despite their practical grasp of mining, are not especially articulate when asked about where the profits from their great discovery will go. They know they need all the help they can find in winning the best possible royalties and taxation deal.

Their biggest feat has been in luring Oliver Waldron to join them. Waldron is the shooting star of international mining — and what is more, reared in County Cork. An eighteenstone rugby player, capped three times for Ireland, Waldron abandoned a key position in Oppenheimer's Anglo-American Corporation to join the Tara board. He is now chief executive at Navan — a formidable figure for the Government to tackle in the imminent negotiations.

Waldron's career so far has been dazzling and his appearance on the Irish mining scene underlines the significance of Navan. After taking first-class honours in mathematics and physics at the university of Cork, he went to Merton College, Oxford, to do a post-graduate degree in nuclear physics. From there he went to Anglo-American and raced through the ranks to be put in charge of its operations in the United States and Canada, at the age of twenty-eight. He is now thirty.

He combines with his massive physique an easy, half-cynical manner. Press conferences are child's play to him, for although not strictly a mining man, he bewilders his critics with figures, then charms them with witticisms.

Waldron is adept at deflating outsiders' claims about the size of Navan: it is an odd

role for an ambitious, rising tycoon. Over steaks and claret in a Dublin hotel he scorned suggestions that the orebody went well beyond the seventy-seven million tons so far proven. He derides allegations that most of the Navan profits will be whisked abroad, pointing out that the four founding directors retain a majority. He himself has a good slice of the equity.

Another prominent director, with 350,000 shares, is Tony O'Reilly, the 'whiz-kid' vice president of the Heinz Corporation of America. He and Waldron played rugby together for Ireland and are close friends. Jointly or severally, they look almost unstoppable.

Waldron seems confident that all will come right in the end — that the nationalisation demands will be beaten off, so that state and shareholders can grow rich together. His faith is sustained by the fact that the Coalition Finance Minister is Ritchie Ryan, who belongs to the 'tory' Fine Gael. Ryan will want revenue from Navan quickly, not a long impasse and the promise of tastier jam tomorrow.

Connoisseurs of the Irish political scene forecast that a deal will be done around March. Meanwhile, the Canadian task-force gouges its way deeper into the orebody, and Navan dreams fondly of the Klondyke era to come.

Richard Hall, formerly with the Observer colour magazine, has recently completed a biography of Stanley, the explorer.