The Bank of Scotland champions badly missed the 25-year-old after slumping to a shock home defeat to Hibernian, although his team-mates recovered to maintain their two-point advantage over their arch rivals with success over Aberdeen on Sunday.

But O’Neill is desperate for the fans’ favourite to return for the tricky trip to managerless Hearts and he expects Bellamy to return to full training later on the week.

He said: “Bellamy is coming on very well indeed and our hope is that he’ll be back in full training with the lads later this week.

“Then it will just be a case of seeing how he goes, although we’re hopeful that he’ll at least be in contention (to play on Sunday), which would obviously be a boost as he’s been a big player for us.”

But with or without Bellamy, the trip to Tynecastle is one O’Neill fully expects to prove treacherous.

Hearts are in turmoil following the dramatic departure of head coach John Robertson yesterday and are not expected to have a full-time replacement in place by Sunday.

But O’Neill rejects any notion that Celtic’s task might be made easier by the events of the past week.

He added: “There’s obviously a bit of turmoil there, although I’m really not sure of the ins and the outs of it all.

“But I must say that I’d be extremely wary of expecting that kind of thing will inevitably count in our favour.

“Sometimes circumstances like that can galvanise players, and we know playing Hearts would be difficult enough at the best of times.

“They’ve obviously beaten us here at Celtic Park very recently and, although our performance in our last game at Tynecastle was excellent, we’ll need to play every bit as strongly to have a chance of coming away with a result on Sunday.”