The Irish Times had a brief article last week about the closure (and recent reopening) of the Bolinden owned Tara Mines lead zinc mine in County Meath. Apparently monies to the tune of 3.8Million Euro were provided to Bolinden by the Irish Government during the shutdown as part of a general EU sponsored support for industries hit by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent fallout. One of the fallouts is Russian dumping of metals like zinc, platinum group metals (PGM) and nickel to generate hard currency to fund the war. As at least one commentator has pointed out, this is trivial compared to the cost for Bolinden to keep the mine on care and maintenence during the shutdown (probably close to 100 Million Euro) and the writeoff Bolinden will take on the assets (over 300 million Euro). The mine did reopen in September of this year with a reduced workforce, new union contract and a lower cost power supply from the ESB.