POSTGRADUATE students have hit out at the Catholic Church over its failure to provide access to its historic Scottish archives.
One of them, Darren Tierney, is in the process of completing a PhD in modern Scottish Catholicism and requires regular access to the archives, which the Herald last month revealed had been forced to close due to "staff shortages".
The 27-year-old, from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, claimed students and academics had been left in the lurch by the Church and told how he has struggled to meet deadlines due to the closure.
Columba House in Edinburgh, which houses the archives, closed its doors indefinitely at the end of last month because there was no-one left to look after the service.
Curator Andrew Nicholl has been absent on long-term sick leave and his assistant was told by the Church to leave immediately rather than work out a month's notice after she submitted her resignation.
Mr Tierney said: "Of all the archives I use, I rely on these most heavily.
"I've had deadlines to meet over the last few weeks and I've just had to do what I could.
"We are now at the end of the third week of closure and it has to be asked whether it was really necessary at all – I mean, do all departing Church staff enjoy four weeks' gardening leave?
"I can't keep up with my research and I'm sure there will be many postgraduates, academics and others who have also been left in the lurch, unable to continue their research."
He added: "I received a letter from the Bishops' Conference saying that if I wished to access the archives it would be by appointment only and I should contact the archivist at Glasgow, which I did, but there's been no response. I think the Glasgow archivist might actually be off on holiday. The arrangements seem to be haphazard."
The archives contain more than one million documents dating back 800 years, including letters from Mary Queen of Scots and papers relating to Oscar Wilde.
The Catholic Church is already under pressure from academics after it announced plans to split up the documents and distribute them to various locations across Scotland.
More than 100 academics, including the country's most prominent historian, Professor Tom Devine, have signed a letter calling for the Church to re-think its proposals.
Mr Tierney also condemned the move, claiming it would cause massive problems for students and academics.
He said: "I'm totally against the plans to scatter the archives all over the country. They have not been able to justify it at all.
"If they split them, we can only wonder how they plan to ensure regular access to them when it has been beyond them these past three weeks.
"It will cause me all sorts of problems in terms of access, as well as the costs involved in travelling to and from different sites around the country to get to different documents."
Part of the collection known as the Blairs Library – 27,000 books from the pre-1878 era, which has been housed at the National Library of Scotland since 1978 – is to be gifted to Aberdeen University, where the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Archbishop Mario Conti, is an honorary professor.
The remaining post-1878 material at Columba House is to be divided between eight separate dioceses.
The Church said it could no longer underwrite the £150,000 cost of keeping the archives open and free after funding from a private trust was suspended.
No-one from the Church was available to comment on the indefinite closure of Columba House in the meantime.
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