Last Friday night the town of Omagh took another of the myriad of difficult steps on the long road to recovery. One hundred and forty six days after the events of that catastrophic afternoon last August, the pain of memory does not get any easier but at least there are now signs that people are coping and looking hesitantly towards the future.

The occasion was a dinner organised by the Omagh District Celtic Supporters' Club in a hotel in the town and the principal beneficiary was a self-help and support group set up and run by relatives of the victims. The guest list was impressive - the current Celtic captain, Tom Boyd, European Cup winning captain Billy McNeill, former Celtic captain Paul McStay and current Celtic director Michael McDonald had all travelled from Scotland to be part of the event. They were bolstered by representatives from Celtic supporters clubs from as far away as Monaghan and Belfast who had made the effort on a bitterly cold mid-winter night to be part of the fund raising occasion.

There was poignancy as well. Oran Doherty, one of the youngest victims of the bomb, was a Celtic fanatic and his coffin was draped in the club's colours on the day of his funeral in Buncrana - Celtic centre-half, Marc Rieper, helped carry the coffin. Oran's parents were specially invited guests at last Friday night's dinner. The return to the town where the son had died must have been impossibly difficult for them, but there was a positivity to the night's proceedings that might have made it all just a bit easier.

All around the hall there were people from the town who had either been directly or indirectly affected by the bomb. They had been drawn together by their support for their team and the belief they could make some sort of difference by contributing towards the financial future of the support group. But in the early part of the evening the bomb and its aftermath were very much the unspoken sub-text of everything that was going on.

The appearance of Boyd had been a closely-guarded secret and was only possible because his first son had been born earlier than expected. Along with Billy McNeill and Paul McStay, he was welcomed into the hall by the 300-strong crowd to thunderous applause and acclaim. In his typically understated way, Paul McStay captured the moment perfectly as he spoke about the prevailing mood that was underpinning the evening. He told of how he had been in a public park in Glasgow when news of the bomb started to filter through and how, coincidentally, he had been talking to a woman from Omagh. "All she wanted to do," remembered McStay, "was get to a phone and find out how her family were. That affected me so much. We can only guess at the pain you're all going through, but the reason we're all here tonight is to show that we're hurting with you." Billy McNeill echoed those words. "I remember being so pleased when I found out all about Celtic's charitable origins when they were formed all those years ago. I'd like to think that by coming here tonight and representing the club we're continuing that tradition in some small way."

This function was a success on so many different levels and it was a privilege to be part of it. In purely monetary terms, thousands of pounds were raised for the relatives' group. In addition to the proceeds from the sale of tickets, there was a prize draw and an auction of soccer, Gaelic football and hurling jerseys that raised in excess of £10,000. Pride of place went to a Newcastle United jersey worn by Shay Given and signed by all his club team-mates which fetched £500. But this was about more than money. This was about a community finding a viable means of helping itself with the happy off-shoot of being able to reinforce their loyalty to their football team along the way.

The intimate involvement of Celtic football club in the fund-raising evening should also go a long way to ending a dispute that has been festering in the club's Irish support since the beginning of the season. Club chairman Fergus McCann was reported to have been critical of the travelling support and to have expressed a desire to move Celtic away from its more overt Irish roots towards the middle ground. Belfast-based Celtic fans took offence and paraded a banner at the next home game proclaiming: "We're no bigots Mr McCann. We're Irish and we're Celtic supporters." The club's response was to remove those holding the banner from the ground.

But on Friday night Michael McDonald, a director who came on to the board with McCann during his take-over four years ago, donated a series of exclusive prizes to the draw on behalf of the club. Billy McNeill then drove home the point. "Celtic's Irish dimension is such an important part of the club," he said. "And that should never be forgotten, no matter what happens."

Even with the illustrious guests and the high-powered fund raising, there was also something reassuringly old-fashioned about the entire night. Close your eyes and you could have been at a GAA or football dinner-dance anywhere in the country. And yet this was being done ostensibly in the name of a football club that is now incredibly big business and likely to be valued at a figure close to £100 million when Fergus McCann sells his controlling stake later this year.

When McCann was moving to wrest control of the club in the dark days five years ago it is worth remembering that a lot of the small shareholdings were held by Irish supporters. There is more than one anecdote about elderly ladies in the glens of Antrim finding Celtic share certificates tucked away under mattresses or buried deep among family papers. Celtic has come a long, long way from the succession of miserly regimes which seemed content to preside over its slow demise.

Friday was a chance to see how far modern football in general and Celtic, in particular, have travelled, even in the space of a decade. When Kenny Dalglish and Jim Kerr ride into town on a white charger fronting a bid financed by a largely faceless clutch of big-money investors you wonder just how relevant some seemingly archaic notion of a football club having charitable principles really is.

But in that Omagh hotel on a frosty January night it never seemed so important, never seemed so worth cherishing. Just because investors now talk telephone numbers as they circle the club looking for a quick financial killing does not mean that same club cannot be a living, breathing part of its supporters' lives. And it does not mean that those same supporters cannot expect it to be strong enough and principled enough to make a difference.

Celtic Football Club mattered to Oran Doherty and it still matters to those people who gathered in Omagh last Friday night. To its credit, Celtic is now giving something back.