Thirty-one years ago the new manager of Glasgow Celtic Football Club had his first taste of sporting controversy. Then 17, Martin O'Neill was an important player in the St Malachy's College McRory Cup Gaelic football team. His school was due to play against Newry's Abbey CBS but problems arose because O'Neill was also playing soccer with Distillery.

In those, less enlightened, days, no school in the North would agree to stage the game as long as he remained a registered Irish League player. The match was eventually played at Omagh CBS after an intervention by a Christian Brother on the staff there whose nephew had played for Belfast Celtic.

That early introduction to sporting politics should stand O'Neill in good stead over the weeks and months ahead. But even at their very height, GAA myopia and paranoia will seem like minor irritants compared to the bearpit in which O'Neill now finds himself.

One of his more unusual hobbies is reputed to be spending time in courtrooms, listening intently to criminal trials as they unfold. The most testing cross-examination is yet to come.

For all his bullishness and optimism last week, nothing could prepare O'Neill for his new environment and his fresh challenge. Celtic is a club which, if truth be told, has been in varying stages of decline for almost 20 years and has up until now proved itself incapable of adjusting to the seismic changes in the football culture which surrounds it.

Outwardly, particularly in the building of a fine, modern stadium, Celtic has given the appearance of having kept pace. But in every other facet of the way in which the football club is run it has been falling further and further behind for the past two decades.

That is the scale of the task which now confronts O'Neill and it should be of no surprise to anyone that he spent so long making up his mind to leave the safety of Leicester City and its low horizons for the unrealistic expectations of Celtic's huge support.

Celtic Park has been a managerial graveyard in recent years - Liam Brady, Lou Macari, and John Barnes have hardly set the world alight since vacating the manager's chair - and O'Neill must have been acutely aware that failure now could see him stranded in the slow lane for many years to come.

In many ways, his appointment marks a fascinating coda to the period at the Celtic helm of the man who saved the club from bankruptcy just six years ago. Fergus McCann had spearheaded the takeover that saw the old board, which had presided over Celtic's decline, deposed and a new regime put in place.

McCann's buzzword was "modernisation" and one of the planks of his modernising platform was moving the club away from what he regarded as an exaggerated emphasis on its Irish roots and heritage.

McCann was very much from the brash and direct school of business management and his no-frills handling of what was inevitably a controversial issue with Celtic's large Irish contingent caused consternation from the outset.

IN THE event, very little of substance really changed and, when McCann left office last year, Celtic's Irish element was as strong and as vibrant as ever. And as news reached the erstwhile chairman of last week's appointment of O'Neill - a Catholic from a Celtic-supporting family in county Derry - he may have allowed himself a rueful smile.

The chances of distancing the club from Ireland and the Irish must now seem all but non-existent. O'Neill's background and upbringing has been a very obvious focus of coverage over the past week. On one level it is a very positive advantage. He will not be taking over as some innocent, oblivious to Celtic's fabled past.

But this knowledge will only carry O'Neill so far and there have already been worrying signs that the club and its support is not quite ready to take on board all the lessons of its recent troubled past.

For too long there has been a Celtic hang-up with regard to the perceived passion of its managers and players and the extent to which they are prepared to buy into the club's collective history and heritage.

The supporters even have a phrase for it - "Celtic minded" - and woe betide anyone associated with the club who does not pass that acid test. Does anyone think for a moment that when the world's great clubs - the likes of Barcelona, Manchester United and Milan - go looking for a coach, they make it a job requirement that any prospective candidate must have supported the team as a boy, slept in replica pyjamas and can recite all the members of the team the last time the club won the European Cup?

Such an approach is so outdated as to be laughable and yet, to listen to some of the debates among the Celtic support as the club agonised over a new manger, you would be forgiven for thinking that blind devotion to the cause was still an essential prerequisite.

That is why we have been treated to the absurd media debate as to whether O'Neill himself supported Celtic as a young child growing up in Derry.

Nobody knows for sure and in his press conference after his appointment he had more common sense than to go down that particular road. The banal truth is that, like so many boys of his generation growing up in rural Ireland, O'Neill probably had vague allegiances to Celtic, but they would have come a distant second to affections for a particular club from the old English first division.

Whether that makes him better or worse equipped for the job in hand is, and should remain, a moot point. One mildly positive spinoff from the traumas the Celtic support have had to endure over the past few years should have been to focus their minds on what they expect from a manager and his football team.

Hollow words and empty gestures are easy to deliver. The drive, determination and hard work needed to pull a club up off its knees are much more precious commodities.

O'Neill has given every indication that he may just be able to bring those qualities with him to Celtic Park. He has never given the impression that he is a man overly-interested in the past and that is something which should stand him in good stead as he tries to plot a course for Celtic's future.