DURING these slate coloured winter days, March 17th seems to be years away, a distant signpost to spring, as unimaginable now as daffodils and picnics. In New York, however, plans for the city's St Patrick's Day parade were finalised months ago. Now the organisers have moved on to the real business of the Kelly green bash - The Controversy.
The Controversy has in recent years become a predictable ingredient, something you could count on like the majorettes white wet look boots and the fat men waddling along in paramilitary gear.
But this time the flurry is not about the right of Irish homosexuals to parade as Irish homosexuals (Irish homosexuals have, of course, been parading all along as other things, firemen and nurses, for instance:) The theme of the 1997 row is the famine or, as it is referred to in this city's adenoidal accent, "de badayda fabin".
John Leahy, the newly appointed grand marshall of the upcoming parade, does not look like a trouble maker and, to be fair, he is not. When Mr Leahy recently pledged to use his office and his parade to publicise the famine - emphasising what he sees as Britain's culpability for Irish mass starvation - he was not creating a row, just enlarging one.
The row erupted in October when New York State signed into law a bill requiring every public and private school in the state to teach the history of the famine. In a victory for Irish American lobbying groups, a 1994 bill was amended to mandate "that the famine be portrayed as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust".
Deliberate campaign
At the signing ceremony, New York's governor George Pataki declared that the famine "was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive". The British Embassy in Washington responded by condemning the comparison with the Holocaust as "insulting" and by denying any "official intent to cause suffering or starvation".
Ordinary Americans, hazy at best on the famine and ignorant of its 150th anniversary, suddenly got the message. "You know about de badayda fabin?" the woman on the subway asked me, in a conversation that had begun because she wanted to know what "Riverdancing" meant, "liderally".
Having failed in that explanation, I attempted a brief historical summary. She listened for a minute, shook her head impatiently and said: "No, no. Now it turns out it was jennasoyd."
The genocide idea is appealing to the majority of Americans who like nothing better than a good conspiracy. People who know little about President Kennedy's political career, for instance, can lecture you for hours on the single bullet theory.
And now English skulduggery has become the famine's grassy knoll. Avril Doyle, in a recent radio interview here, may have said: "There was not a genocide agenda on the part of the authorities at the time," but true conspiracy buffs know that Oliver Stone will make the famine cover up movie any day now.
Heated debate
The Irish American/British spat is just one side of the controversy, however. A more heated debate is currently raging within the Irish American establishment, which is divided not on the legislation itself, but on what exactly teachers should be instructed to say about the famine.
"Is it to be a lesson in blame?" Robert Scally, professor of history at New York University, asked recently at a famine commemoration seminar. That certainly is the implication of the language used by the governor... But I fail to see the point of fixing the blame on the dead human agents involved so long after the fact."
Prof Scally also criticisms what he sees as a misguided impatience to write the new curriculum. "When slavery was added to the bill for example, the curriculum was drawn up rather offhandedly, in a relatively short time.
"By contrast, when the Holocaust was added, there were several years of seminars in which teachers, historians and survivors agreed on a common language that formed the curriculum, went into the teacher's workbook and into the scholar's mind." He proposes that famine lobbyists follow the second model - but doubts that they will.
A milestone
Whatever the substance of the new famine studies curriculum, its very existence is a milestone for Irish Americans like John Leahy. For every immigrant group in the US, it seems, there is a time to keep your head down, get on with it and hope you won't be noticed. Ask an immigrant what he is and he will typically respond "an American".
Only with growing prosperity and confidence - albeit in just one tier of the group - is the hyphenated identity acquired. And, paradoxically, only when the necessary political influence has been secured does the firmly established group seek retroactive victim status. Irish America, one of the biggest success stories in US history, has apparently now reached that stage.
John Leahy personifies Irish America's success. The son of a bricklayer from Co Cork and a teacher from Co Clare, he grew up in the tough, working class area of Riverdale in the Bronx. Today he is the president of Quinnipiac College in Connecticut.
"My father was as big an influence as my mother in stressing education," he recalls. "He took me to work with him one weekend when I was eight years old and I did everything wrong. He quickly lost his patience and told me to sit on the kerb for six hours and watch. On the way home he said, `John, you're doing OK at school, so stick at it. You'll never make a tradesman'".
Mr Leahy's school did not teach famine studies, just regular history for regular Americans. But that was back in the dark ages when education's guiding principle was still advancement, not grievance.