The death of Syd McIlroy in Antrim at the end of last week severs another of the few remaining links with Belfast Celtic, the long-defunct Irish League side. It also comes at a time when interest in the history of the club and its subsequent consignment to Irish football folklore has been rekindled by the publication of a new book which does a fine job of placing the Belfast Celtic story in its proper social and political context.

When McIlroy signed for Belfast Celtic in 1936, the manager Elisha Scott was in the process of building a team that would dominate Irish football throughout the next two decades. A leftsided winger, McIlroy played in a celebrated forward line alongside Jimmy McAlinden and Norman Kernaghan as Celtic won five consecutive Irish League titles between 1936 and 1940. Belfast Celtic were the dominant force in local football at the time, McIlroy an integral part.

Formed in 1891, Celtic had entered the Irish League in 1896 but its history up until its winding up in 1949 was punctuated by controversy and upheaval. Author Padraig Coyle's achievement is to make explicit connections between the violent sub-text that dogged Celtic throughout its existence and the wider developments in the society around it. It also becomes tellingly evident that the same sectarian and political tensions that blight modern day Irish League football are not new, rather have been intrinsic parts of the structure of the game here since it was first organised on a formal basis.

One match report of an Irish Cup semi-final replay between Celtic and Glentoran on St Patrick's Day 1920 included in the book is eerily timeless. "Wild scenes and incidents of a serious character resulted from the Irish Cup semi-final replay at Cliftonville yesterday afternoon when the match had to be abandoned.. . there were repeated baton charges by the police inside and outside the enclosure and fierce stone throwing by rival mobs." Change the date and the teams and this could have been written about an incident at an Irish League football game at any time over the last 70 years.

The fall-out from that abandoned game in 1920 also has contemporary echoes. Coyle euphemistically describes the relationship between Belfast Celtic and the Irish Football Association as "turbulent" as time and again the club found itself on the wrong end of draconian punishments from the authorities. Glentoran were removed from the competition but so too were Celtic, who were held responsible for damage to the ground even though the game was played at a neutral venue and was not under their control. An uneasy peace characterised relationships with the authorities over the following 30 years

That, though, was shattered on Boxing Day 1948 with the riot at the end of game between Linfield and Belfast Celtic and the savage attack on Celtic striker Jimmy Jones by Linfield supporters. Jones's leg was broken in the assault and it took him two years to recover fully. By that time, however, Celtic had resigned from the Irish League seemingly resigned to the fact that it would be no longer possible for the club to function in the prevailing political climate.

A triumphant tour of North America in 1949 - during which they famously beat Scotland 2-0 in New York - followed, but by this stage the Belfast Celtic board had decided to wind up its affairs. It is here that Coyle's book hits its stride. He suggests that the traditional spin on the club's exit may be over-simplistic and that a boardroom dispute over the ownership of shareholdings and the appointment of directors had been developing long before the Jimmy Jones incident. Intriguingly, the minutes of the board meetings during this crucial period are missing so the real reasons for the club's demise must remain the stuff of rumour and conjecture. Another theory is that the removal of the club from the Irish League was intended only to be temporary and that the until the political situation improved.

The club was never dissolved completely and Elisha Scott, the last manager, continued in a caretaker capacity for the next decade looking after business correspondence and the upkeep of the ground in west Belfast. These were hardly the actions of a club that intended to disappear and there are hints in Coyle's account that it was biding its time before applying to join the League of Ireland, a move that would have predated Derry City's similar route back into senior football by some 30 years. Members of Jimmy McSparron's family were major shareholders in Belfast Celtic at the time. "I'm not sure it was meant to be a permanent situation," McSparron told Padraig Coyle.

The only organised sporting activity at Celtic Park throughout the next three decades after the club shut its doors was greyhound racing, but after some initial success attendances dwindled during the worst years of the Troubles when people were reluctant to come out on the streets of west Belfast at night. The land was sold and in 1985 the ground was demolished.

Paradise Lost and Found finishes with some speculation about a revival of Belfast Celtic and even the possibility of it rejoining the Irish League at some stage. But without a ground and with all the old infrastructure dismantled this seems the stuff of fantasy. The Irish League became a much-devalued product without Celtic and much of its present malaise has its roots in the turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s. But if there was not enough common ground with the IFA to keep a club from west Belfast in the Irish League 50 years ago, little has happened in the interim to suggest things might be any better now.

The travails of Donegal Celtic, another west Belfast club formed in the 1970s, when it had to pull out of a match with the RUC last year because of political pressure provided yet more evidence of the bankruptcy of football here and the all but insurmountable problems faced by any club which draws on substantial support from the Nationalist community.

The timing of this book could hardly be more apposite. The last two weeks have seen Irish football agonising about the morality or otherwise of hosting a game against a country which has been waging a systematic war within its own boundaries and on its own people. Column inches, letter pages and radio phone-ins have been engulfed with argument and counter-argument including the hoary old chestnut that "politics should be kept out of a sport like football."

But the seemingly disparate stories of Yugoslavia and Belfast Celtic together provide incontrovertible proof that football, or any other sport, cannot toddle along in an isolation chamber of its own. Politics do matter and even if we learn nothing else, that might be a start.

Paradise Lost and Found - The Story of Belfast Celtic by Padraig Coyle (Mainstream).