“In all our work from the very beginning, even when it wasn’t fashionable to do so, we always talked to local people on the ground.”

In this particular instance Professor Richard Conroy is talking about his experiences with Karelian Diamonds, a junior exploration company that has just uncovered Finland’s first new kimberlite discovery for more than a decade.

But Professor Conroy has a long history in the mining industry and his experiences relating to and getting along with local communities go back a lot further than Karelian’s work on the ground in Finland, which only really started in earnest in the early part of the last decade.

The Professor also heads up Irish gold developer Conroy Gold, and before that he was instrumental in the discovery of one of the country’s world class zinc deposits at Galmoy. Along the way he has also served in the upper house of the Irish legislature, so he knows what it’s like to be a legislator as well as a businessman.

That’s lead to a down-to-earth approach to community relations that’s served him well over more than thirty years, going back to the early 1980s when the full potential at Galmoy was first recognised.

You start, to the Professor’s mind, from first principles. “In Ireland one of our chaps will go round the house first of anyone who’s land we’ll be working on”, he says. The basic courtesies are always well appreciated and the mutual exchange of information that occurs in these face-to-face meetings does a lot to break down any mistrust there might be.

“Galmoy”, says the Professor, “is a very agricultural dairy farming area”. He learned a lot there that he’s carried on into the work that gets done on Clontibret, the gold license held by Conroy that straddles the Irish border with Northern Ireland.

But which ever side of the border the company is working on, the same rules apply. Respect the land. “We always take samples at the edges of fields rather than at the centre of them”, says the Professor.

In Finland, acting as a good steward for the land is equally important, and who better to approach that issue than the Finns themselves.

“We have the great advantage of the Finnish Geological Survey”, says the Professor. “Our actual immediate work on the ground is done by them. They are Finns.”

It’s a good way to get the dialogue going, having Finns talk to Finns, although representatives of Karelian itself very quickly enter the picture. “We are encouraged to go in and talk to the local landowners”, says the Professor, “although a lot of land is owned by the forestry commission so we talk to them as well. It makes a huge difference.”

So far Karelian’s work has mainly been exploration and the environmental impact has been minimal. But if and when work commences on the construction of any mine on Karelian’s ground the Professor has no doubts that it will be done to the highest standards.

“We had Outokumpu as a shareholder in one of our previous companies and they took us to visit one of their operations and we saw the high standards that they had in every way and took that on board.”

Indeed, the Professor credits that Outokumpu visit with setting the example that Irish zinc mines, both at Galmoy and Lisheen subsequently followed. They are, he says, “textbook examples of modern day mines”.

The Finns, it seems, are now reaping the rewards of their own, decades-old, best practice