The well-known description ‘the dear green place’ does not, despite the obvious hint, make any reference to Celtic FC.  The depiction was in fact applied to 18^th century Glasgow with its small population of 20,000 and grazing animals kept on the banks of the Clyde;  a river in which most people could wade across and where salmon were caught regularly.  Nonetheless, the character of Glasgow began to change as the town embarked on a journey that culminated in it becoming one of the the chief commercial cities of the British Empire.

In fact, most of the subsequent wealth of the city was the result of international trade, but especially the exploitation of numerous other countries, particularly those in the Americas and West Indian colonies with their great resources of tobacco, sugar, cotton and of course, human beings.  These were all aspects of the slave trade and it is to this human tragedy that Glasgow owes much of its early wealth.

The mercantile and commercial stimulus that the city experienced resulted in Glasgow becoming a magnet in attracting people from all over Scotland to provide the manpower required for a period of rapid industrialisation.  Significant urbanisation also resulted due to this change.

The city was later to be known as the 'Workshop of the World' and  'Second City of the Empire'.  By the beginning of the 19th century the population had risen to 77,000, by 1821 almost 150,000 and, by 1851, it had become Scotland's largest city with 330,000 inhabitants.  By this time the British economy, despite experiencing uncontrolled booms and slumps, was the most 'successful' in the world, although the meaning and nature of the term 'success' is subjectable as well as contestable, not least of all in moral terms when one considers that much of this 'achievement' was being built on the suffering and deaths of many in 'the colonies' and nearer home.

For example, alongside the prosperity and rich and lavish lifestyles of those who owned the means of production, the era also threw up a hell on earth for most others.  David Bremner wrote about some of the resulting conditions of the time.  On visiting Coatbridge, a Lanarkshire town on the outskirts of Glasgow, he spoke of a sprawling frontier settlement built around iron works, where the sky was lit up at night and there was heavy and relentless work endured by the workforce, a majority  of them of Irish immigrant stock.  Lanarkshire and Glasgow offered a hard life for many and in 1877 poor working conditions helped cause the Blantyre Mining Disaster in which 207 miners lost their lives.

Glasgow's new population came from all over the country, especially from the Scottish Highlands.  Most of these native Scots were of the Protestant faith but a small number were Catholic and this reflected in the opening of a Catholic Chapel in 1792 in Argyll Street for the few hundred Catholic highlanders in the city.

This was the first Catholic Chapel opened in the fiercely anti-Catholic city for around 250 years.  Indeed, there had been a series of anti-Catholic riots in Glasgow just a few years previous to the opening of the new chapel.

However it was the influx of Catholics from Ireland from the period of the Great Famine until just before the First World War in particular that changed the social, cultural and ethnic and religious face of Glasgow and the west-central belt of Scotland, and of course, gave rise to Celtic Football Club.

From being a tiny organisation geographically and numerically limited to a few parts of the Highlands, especially in South Uist and Banffshire, the Catholic Church in Scotland was transformed with the influx of Irish Catholics and, from the 1840/1850s, Catholic churches began to be built by the immigrants in Glasgow, Lanarkshire and to the west in Greenock and Dumbarton in particular.

Part of the importance of this is that but for this development there would be no Celtic Football Club in the present.  In addition, it is from these areas of Irish settlement in Scotland that most of Celtic's main support base can be found even to this day.

Early in the 19th century a few thousand Irish Catholics had begun to make their way to the Glasgow area, in the main as seasonal workers and cheap labour.

This small-scale immigration changed with the Great Hunger (an Gorta Mor) of 1845-51 when 100,000 Irish arrived in the Glasgow area, spreading refugees from the most appalling human catastrophe in 19th century Europe.  For the rest of the 19th Century and into the 20th thousands more destitute Irish would join them.  As the Irish and their offspring filled out throughout the city and its environs eventually the coalmines, shipbuilding and iron and steel industries all gladly received their share of this influx of cheap labour.

For those who survived the Great Hunger, the horrific conditions experienced on the journey to Scotland as well as the remnants of disease and ongoing poverty, what faced them and to an enormous degree their subsequent generations in Scotland, was a life in overcrowded disease infested accommodation as well as the lowest rungs in the ladder that comprised the employment hierarchy.

As a result of the Great Hunger, by 1851 almost 20 per cent of Glasgow's population had been born in Ireland with the peak of Irish born in Scotland being found in the decade of Celtic's birth in the 1880s.  Primarily as a result of the Irish influx Catholicism began to re-emerge in Scotland and as Catholic churches began to open so also did Catholic charities start to spring up.  Once again this development was also crucial to the ideas and ethos that gave rise to Celtic Football Club.

The St Vincent de Paul Society was founded in Scotland in 1846 amongst the Irish Catholic poor of Edinburgh before rapidly spreading throughout the Catholic population of the urban west central belt.  Its aim was to succour the poor in spiritual and material ways.  The Catholic Men's Society was introduced to Scotland from Ireland in the 1850s, The League of The Cross begun in the 1870s and other such Catholic organisations as the 19th century progressed.

As Catholics fought to establish their civil rights in Scotland, and, with an absence or lack of state relief, at this time abject poverty could mean deportation back to Ireland - even if a person had been born in Scotland for ten or more years.

During this time inducements existed that might have provided avenues of escapes from such dire circumstances for some immigrant Irish Catholics and their families.  For example, some people not of the Catholic faith used these conditions as an enticement towards proselytisation.  This meant that some poor Catholics were offered a lifeline to keep them alive if they became Protestants.  Often these enticements consisted of not much more than food or soup for the family such was the depressing state of affairs at the time.

It was experiences such as these that Celtic's most significant founder, the Marist brother Walfrid, would address in his own influential way.

With the development of 19th and 20th century capitalism, the concomitant processes of urbanisation, industrialisation and the rise in population, these changes yielded great extremes of wealth and poverty.  In such an environment it is not difficult to see how the growth of organised sport, particularly football for the working classes, would represent a bright light in the dark lives of many people.

Today many people in developing countries eke out existences for themselves making wages that contemporary workers in Scotland would not recognise as adequate and proper.  However, for a huge number of the people reading these pages they will have had grandparents and great-grandparents who in 1887/88 would have formed the almost 27 per cent of the adult male workforce in Glasgow who earned no more than the basic minimum of £1 per week.

Add this to a large family of possibly eight, ten or twelve children and further exacerbated by the factor of the uncertain employment patterns that most of the Irish unskilled workmen faced.  Many people in Glasgow, particularly those in the east end, lived in some of the worst housing in Europe and almost half the families lived in single rooms.  It would be the middle of the 20th century before town planners began to devise ways to disperse Glasgow’s dense population.

It is no surprise that life was very demanding for many people in Scotland, particularly for the poor that comprised the Irish in the west central belt.  Indeed, these are some of the very conditions that were identified by Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth in their seminal research that led the way to some dramatic changes in public attitudes with regards poverty, the reasons why it existed as well as some of the possible solutions.  From such reports eventually emerged the National Health Service.

Where the chambers were located was of course at the head of the city centre’s George Square area:  a lavish statement describing Scotland’s status as the junior partner in the great project that was the British Empire. Just a few hundred yards away to the east lay the great wastes of humanity that existed as Glasgow’s poor and destitute:  a mile away lay the deprivation and degradation that enveloped the area around Celtic Park.  

In electoral politics the 19th century had been a long hard struggle for those who were concerned with popular representation in Britain’s political life.