We use a passive seismic data set recorded from June 2017 to July 2018 by twenty-one stations deployed in a five by five km grid to the south-west of the Boliden Tara Mines orebody (Eastern Ireland) to image the shallower part of the Carboniferous rock units. We cross-correlate one year of ambient noise between all station pairs to generate cross-correlation functions that are rich in surface waves. Then we investigate the locations of the noise sources by applying f-k cross-correlation beamforming. We find two persistent noise sources associated with oceanic microseisms and a cluster of anthropogenic activities, respectively. We undertake dispersion analysis to extract group velocity measurements in the 1–9 Hz band that we invert using the fast marching method to create Rayleigh wave velocity maps. This is followed by a wavelet-based sparsity constrained tomographic method to produce a 3-D shear wave velocity model down to 800 metres. The results highlight low and high-velocity anomalies related to the structural and stratigraphic heterogeneity within the Upper Dark limestone formation. In addition, the velocity gradient of our model agrees with the sonic log velocity profile available adjacent to the study area, suggesting that this sparse network can be used to obtain reliable broad-scale information and could also guide the design phase of more expensive and involved experiments, such as active seismic reflection imaging.