As he stood on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during last year’s St. Paddy’s Day parade, Terence Cardinal Cooke, a man who finds nuclear weapons tolerable and beer spilled on Fifth Avenue intolerable, cast a cold eye on the rowdies. As a result, James J. Comerford, the parade chairman, was asked to do something about the increasing number of drunks and hooligans. To facilitate crowd control, Mr. Comerford changed the day of this year’s parade to Sunday. Then, because of a massive public outcry, he decided that the parade would be held on St. Patrick’s Day after all, to the dismay of the Cardinal, certain Fifth Avenue businessmen and city officials. “There will be confiscation of booze,” Deputy Police Commissioner Alice McGillion announced, “and there will be mass arrests.” Mayor Koch insists that all public drunkenness laws will be strictly enforced this year, and the New York City Police Department has asked Long Island Rail Road and PATH policemen to deal with the rowdies from Long Island and New Jersey before they reach the city.

The furor over public drunkenness recalls another St. Patrick’s Day. In 1961, Mr. Comerford, then a Criminal Court judge, banned Brendan Behan from participating in the parade. Behan, arguably the greatest Irish writer of his generation, was dismissed by Judge Comerford as “a common drunk and disorderly person.” The novelist Flann O ‘Brien called Behan “a reckless drinker,” but also “a fearless denouncer of humbug and pretense, and so proprietor of the biggest heart that has beaten in Ireland for the past 40 years.” That was a magic year for Irish-Americans. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated that January, and abruptly the Irish were no longer a minority group. However, Judge Comerford saw Behan as a threat to the newfound dignity of the Irish in America. Behan had been making fun of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who would be in the parade’s reviewing stand. Worse, he had publicly invited Francis Cardinal Spellman to his play, “The Hostage.” The New York Times’s review of the play had noted: “Certain obscene gestures are tolerated beyond endurance ... needless and shocking ... nauseating ... blatant vulgarity.”

Behan had begun writing plays in prison. Oddly enough, among the first of the New York literati to befriend the “convict-author” was Norman Mailer, who told the biographer Ulick O’Connor: “New York was dead in those days. It was the end of the Eisenhower regime, a puritan period. Brendan’s Hostage broke the ice. It was a Catholic Hellzapoppin. It made the beatnik movement - Kerouac, Ginsberg, myself and others - respectable uptown. “Before Brendan, we were in exile down in the Village. ‘The Hostage’ was adored because of Brendan’s captivating humor and personality. He was an ice-breaker, and the times needed an icebreaker.” Judge Comerford had a different idea of respectability. Born on a farm in Kilkenny, he came to America and worked his way through Columbia University and Fordham Law School. He became a judge and leader of local Irish societies. Referring to Judge Comerford, Jimmy Breslin wrote: “Lord, to imagine the day when the Irish would honor a man who puts poor human beings in the jailhouse!” Behan was born in a Dublin slum to a family that had come down in the world. His father, Stephen Behan, was jailed for political activities at the time of Brendan’s birth, his uncle wrote the Irish national anthem and his grandmother hung a picture of Lenin among the saints on her parlor wall.

At age 8, Brendan was a member of the Fianna, the young people’s I.R.A., and early in 1939, his Granny Furlong was apprehended at the scene of an explosion in Birmingham. The British police found a quantity of gelignite hidden between the 77-year-old woman’s breasts - she said she thought the explosives were rock candy - and the judge sentenced her to three years. Also in 1939, Behan, then 16, left Ireland for the first time. He went to England with just a change of clothes and a bomb. Arrested in Liverpool before the bomb could be used, he was sent to a borstal, a reformatory. He was released in 1941. After a mere six months of freedom, Behan took three shots at a policeman during an IRA demonstration in Dublin. The sentence for attempted murder: 14 years. If the borstal was Behan’s prep school, Mountjoy Prison was his university. He read Russian novels, corresponded with writers, translated classical Gaelic poetry and made love to men. Released by a general amnesty in 1946, Behan traveled a bit, then settled in Dublin, married and began a decade of writing in earnest. His prose on his good days rivaled the best in the language, and his early plays got rave reviews in London and Paris.

A master of self-promotion, his one-liners kept the name Brendan Behan in the papers throughout the run of his plays. When he came to New York, he was a star. He dined with Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards and Jackie Gleason. At Sardi’s on the night that “The Hostage” opened on Broadway, the patrons rose and applauded his entrance. He was on the Paar show, the Susskind show, the Ed Murrow show. His memoir, Borstal Boy, sold 20,000 copies in one month. The press followed Behan around town like pilot fish, hoping for a quotable line. Among them: “Allen Ginsberg introduced me to another poet who gets $100 a month from Uncle Sam for being mad. In Ireland, we have to do it for nothing.” “If people want me to behave like Cardinal Spellman or Billy Graham, why don ‘t they pay me the kind of salary those fellows are getting?” All New York loved Behan, with the notable exception of a segment of the Irish community. Writing in The Journal-American, Bill Slocum commented: “Behan is an Irish ‘Uncle Tom’. I would happily accept his problem as none of my affair if he would just once get a spontaneous load on and forget to play ‘Paddy the Mick’ ... “I am as Irish as Mr. Behan, and I resent his contrived and profitable playing of an old stereotype. I have seen Mr. Behan all over town dressed in carefully prepared disarray, and as sober as a judge.”

“I only take a drink twice a day -when I’m thirsty and when I’m not,” Behan said. March 17, 1961 was bitterly cold and windy. In Washington, the President received a scroll bearing the Kennedy coat of arms, a gift from the Irish Government. In Dublin, all the pubs were closed. In New York City, the Gaelic Society of Fordham, Judge Comerford’s alma mater, dropped out of the parade to protest the banning of Behan. The judge pronounced it a grand day for marching, and 100,000 Irishmen marched up Fifth Avenue with, in Jimmy Breslin’s words, “their chests stuck out almost as far as their stomachs.” And Brendan Behan, writer in exile, was across the water - in Jersey City, madly waving a shillelagh at the Manhattan skyline. He told The Jersey Journal how he had felt the breath of freedom when he emerged from the Holland Tunnel, and Mayor Charles Witkowski gave him the key to the city. Behan said he would like to spend the rest of his life in Jersey City, but his wife wanted to get back to Ireland.

On March 17, 1964, Behan was in a diabetic semicoma brought on by heavy drinking. He died three days later. During a prior hospitalization, he had obliged a British journalist who had come to see him for a quote for his obituary. “Think about death?” Behan told the journalist.”Begod, man, I ‘d rather be dead than think about death.” Happy St. Patrick’s Day, 1982. Cardinal Cooke has taken Cardinal Spellman’s place and James J. Comerford still reigns over the parade. And as the riot gear is readied to protect Fifth Avenue from open containers of beer, there is one more thing that Behan said that is worth recalling: “I recommend the judge to read the Confessions of St. Patrick, in which he said, ‘The honest man must walk as warily as a deer, not so much for fear of the enemies of Christianity as for fear of those who pretend to be better Christians than the Apostles.’I do not set myself up as an Apostle, but I think that I can afford to be more open with my sinfulness than Judge Comerford.”