By Tom Deignan

Sure, you heard all about the dispute over at the Fire Department of New York. You know, the one in which the bosses wouldn’t let a group of Bronx firefighters wear their famous green berets as they marched.

But did you hear about the other, possibly even more offensive color controversy which arose around this particularly colorful, and controversial, St. Patrick’s season.

It turns out that a number of Department of Education (DOE) employees were encouraged by their bosses to wear orange for two weeks in the middle of March. The reason was innocuous enough. It was an effort, DOE officials say, to remind parents to get involved in upcoming Citywide Education Council elections.

But the timing of this (if you will) orange order was atrocious. In certain parts of the world, sporting orange on St. Patrick’s Day could get you into quite a donnybrook.

And yet, apparently, DOE officials were quite clueless to the contentious role of color in the history of the Irish nation.

“Nobody was forced to wear orange today,” a DOE spokesman was later quoted as saying. “It was a friendly suggestion to (each public school’s parent coordinator) to remind parents to get out the vote for the Citywide Education Council elections.”

Fair enough. There’s no reason to accuse city DOE officials of anti-Irish bigotry simply because they want parents to get involved in an upcoming election.

On the other hand, one can imagine quite a massive controversy if this had involved some other ethnic group whose student presence in the city’s public schools is heavier. These are, after all, the people who are charged with teaching the city’s youth about history. If they don’t know that orange can be seen as an offensive color on St. Patrick’s Day, they certainly should.

Let me make a full disclosure statement here. I am a New York City high school teacher. I’m not interested in bashing officials who in some way are either my co-workers or my bosses.

Still, though there may not be many Irish students left in New York’s public schools, there are many Irish American employees and a very active Irish studies committee in the teacher’s union.

Ultimately, though, what both the FDNY and DOE controversies say to me is that while the Irish presence in New York has diminished, it remains powerful enough to generate these controversies in the first place. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Some people, of course, can do without this annual St. Patrick’s Day mess. On the always informative Howard Stern radio show the morning of St. Patrick’s Day one of the show’s regulars declared, “Every year they have some stupid controversy.”

He was, of course, referring to the current FDNY tussle and past rows over the exclusion of gays from the march up Fifth Avenue.

It’s tempting to see things that way, of course. It’s not a great thing to see one’s culture reduced to arguments over berets or unpleasant religious facts or colors more often associated with a box of 64 Crayola crayons.

But do you know what? I think it’s good the New York Irish can still make headlines.

Much more importantly, I’m glad I found out that those green berets firefighters wore were not started as some sort of wardrobe equivalent to green beer. There was a truly touching human story behind those.

The mother-in-law of a firefighter began making them for one house on the Bronx in the 1970s and it grew from there. That’s a wonderful thing to learn, and for the FDNY bosses to meddle with it is downright silly.

Make all the rules you want about goofy beads or “Kiss me, I’m Irish” pins. But those berets were an expression of the Irish American contribution to New York City.

Nice job taking that away from all of us. At least we found out about one caring Irish woman who went the extra mile.

Similarly, let’s hope orange is not the color of choice next St. Patrick’s Day, whatever event or cause some official at the DOE is pushing.

But if a few people have learned about the contentious history of the Irish Tricolor, the green and the orange, well, maybe it will all have been worth it.

After all these years, New York is still learning about the Irish.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)