From Central Station, up Argyle Street and out Gallowgate towards Celtic Park you could have been in Ireland, so familiar were the accents around Glasgow on Saturday afternoon. Tricolours trailed from bulging waists and men wore T-shirts which said `Celtic, Pride of Ireland'.

In the battered little public houses that line the grimy main drag towards the ground, men held dark cream-headed pints in their hammy hands and committed atrocities against The Fields of Athenry.

As a race we are smitten with Celtic in a way which precludes the possibility of rational thinking. You can be a Manchester United mind-slave or a freethinking renegade; you can be an anti-GAA bigot or an anti-soccer dinosaur; you can be a rancid right wing loon or a loveable anarchosynicalist; but, by reflex, you will have reserved part of your brain for the goodwill you feel towards Celtic.

Next New Year, try going into your local saloon bar and roaring for Rangers in the New Year derby. Your first exposure to parity of esteem will be when you receive the same treatment as the other patients in casualty.

Soccer isn't central to our lives, in that no city in Ireland can claim to be a soccer city and we dole out the love for our national team in proportions directly linked to the size of the stage they occupy. We have no immense floodlit cathedrals of the game, indeed the GAA possesses at least two dozen grounds more impressive than the best appointed League of Ireland precinct. So Celtic are a symbol of the footballing attainment of the race.

They are like the football wing of the Kennedy clan, proof positive to us that those Irish, who suffered economic expulsion, are doing well. An indication that there must be a crumb of genius in the national gene. We expect so much of them, that they, like the Kennedys, are exempt from the clear-eyed scrutiny that distance should allow.

On Saturday Celtic were awful. A middling team topping a sub-standard league and pretty damn fretful about it too. If they win two more games they will win the Scottish league for the first time since 1988. It will be the least stylish of triumphs but we will celebrate in a tight-lipped spiteful way. Given the choice, we would swap three unbeaten years and a European Cup for the chance to deprive Rangers of their 10th title in the jammiest fashion imaginable.

Celtic and Rangers are the ugly sisters of sport. The pokey way in which one's poverty is the others' riches is the best argument yet for a European superleague which might broaden their vision. And ours.

Rangers, as a literal matter of faith, are masonic nuns. Celtic, of course, loveable rogues, still serve as a vent for the dopiest kind of knee-jerk republicanism, the beery waving of tricolours and raucous chanting of songs by those at the safe end of the Northern conflict. The Saturday afternoon patriots are still with us.

It's easy to sing "Up the RA" and imagine that you would happily die for Ireland when you are in the midst of 50,000 Celtic supporters at a football match.

Outside Celtic Park many of the scarves and flags still suggest in three words of Irish that our day will come.

You meet plenty of decent football-loving men and women on an afternoon in Glasgow, who will lament the excesses which have distinguished the rivalry, yet that middle ground hasn't grown big enough just yet. This column asked about 20 people in the course of the day if things had got better or worse between Celtic and Rangers. Still the same, said most of them. Worse said the balance.

Glasgow is an interesting goldfish bowl study of muddied perceptions. Underpinning all Celtic theology is the cast iron belief that the club and its disciples are morally superior to those who play and worship at Ibrox. Strangely this isn't recognised as a self evident truth by Rangers fans.

Certainly no fuss is made about the religion of any player who wears the green and white hoops whereas Rangers clung for the longest time to a more institutionalised form of bigotry.

Rangers were founded by a Presbyterian Boys Club and have never got over it. Celtic were the recreation ground of Irish emigrants. They too, are mired in the past. No matter how much money comes into the game in Scotland, no matter how many sponsors try desperately to paper over the cracks, no matter how sumptuous the spreads in the executive lounges, the ugliness at the centre still remains.

Rangers are orange bigots. Celtic, of course, just burn the Union Jacks, sing the songs, beat Mo Johnson's father up in a pub, firebomb his house and expect us to see the funny side.

On Saturday, I met three sets of Celtic supporters who told me in exasperated tones of the havoc which is wrought on the visitors end at Celtic Park every time Rangers visit. The seats are ripped out and the toilets are broken and, all in all, those bluenose Rangers fans are unreconstructed savages.

The taxi back to the airport was driven by one such season ticket-holding unreconstructed savage with a bluenose who explained to me in tones delicately designed to convey understanding, but not offence, that he has always been afraid to take his son to see Old Firm games at his beloved Ibrox because of the sheer savagery of Celtic supporters. You should see them.

He went on to muse about how the homes of the two teams illustrated the essential difference between the two tribes.

He goes into Ibrox and there is a central corridor beneath each stand which is 30-yards wide at least and dotted with TV monitors playing highlights and player interviews. There are soothing lights and well painted walls and food concession stands as far as the eye can see. And Parkhead?

"No offence pal, but Parkhid is a shit-hole but that's them for ye."

It is a depressing place to be. Liverpool and Everton have got over their religiously divided pasts and been united by the fetid poverty of their city and the common passion for football. Glasgow is a comparable city in many ways but progress is impossible.

You find that by reflex and by breeding you are a Celtic fan and your sympathies are distressingly rigid. You look for signs to reinforce your prejudice, hoping the cab driver will slip the words `fenian bastards' out between his lips and give you an excuse.

Sometimes sport is smaller than the world around it. Celtic and Rangers, in their eternal bitterness, are a museum piece dedicated to our own past.

The relationship between ourselves and our club in Scotland is warm and unique and worth preserving. Some of the trappings, though, need ditching before the rest of the world begins a new century.

It is an embarrassment that so many of our own, mindlessly play their part in preserving the sporting wing of a sectarian conflict which moves gradually towards hard compromise while Celtic and Rangers never change.