Mary Robinson, an Independent Voice by John Horgan O'Brien Press 224pp, £14.99
Mary Robinson, The Woman Who Took Power in the Park by Lorna Siggins Mainstream, 240pp, £14.99 in UK
Do these books help us to understand the Robinson years, the most exciting period in the making of modern Ireland? And do we learn more than we knew of a formidable woman, now that new life has been breathed into the Presidency and she moves to an immeasurably more demanding task?
John Horgan and Lorna Siggins look at Mrs Robinson from different angles. Both are journalists, detached as they ought to be, yet close enough to their subject to be considered insiders by those who have decided that the safest way to get at the former President is to attack her friends.
Horgan and Mary T.W. Bourke, as she then was, were elected to the Senate on the same day in 1969, both Independents fired by the spirit of reform and elected by university constituencies. Both were to join the Labour Party, where as often as not their causes, like their electoral ambitions, were doomed to frustration.
Horgan patiently - too patiently, perhaps - guides us through the labyrinth of Labour's administrative council and parliamentary party with the rueful air of someone who knows what it is to find standing orders, a phalanx of stubborn colleagues and fear of change, masquerading as a hundred and one local considerations, stacked against him.
He explores in fine detail the internal manoeuvres over which Frank Cluskey and Dick Spring presided. Cluskey, "the gruff, witty, ex-butcher TD, carved in one piece from the Dublin proletariat", came close to Robinson's position on the North. Spring, whose background, training and personality were close to hers, was to figure largely in one of her rare disagreements with the government - about the visit to Belfast during which she shook hands with Gerry Adams.
Inside Labour, as the party beat about the bush, recognising the need for social change but reluctant to grasp the nettle, John Horgan was more patient than Mary Robinson. Indeed, there are moments when Horgan (who refers to himself in the third person) hints that her approach, far from placating opponents, seemed certain to provoke them.
In the end, frustration with the pace of change led her to resign from the party and, almost on the eve of the Presidential campaign, to think of quitting active politics altogether.
But her sights had been set on change, as she now remembers, ever since she had accompanied her father on his medical rounds and saw the conditions of poor families in Ballina and the surrounding countryside.
The Bourkes were well-off Catholics, with ancestors of Protestant stock; and Mary had been educated at a private school in Mayo, at Mount Anville in Dublin and in a finishing school in Paris before she began to study law, first in Trinity College, later - towards the end of the 1960s - in Harvard.
Had she stayed in Mayo, as Horgan observes, she might have had a successful practice, followed the family leanings and joined Fine Gael, even represented the constituency in the Dail. Of course, it wouldn't have satisfied her.
For all its foot-dragging, Labour was her political home; and Spring was the leader who had the courage, imagination and persistence to ensure that she became a candidate for the Presidency.
What's clear from both of these books is that Mary Robinson had decided, perhaps before she had begun to study law, not only that she wanted change but that she knew how it might be achieved. She was no politician by accident; her apparently separate careers derived from the same ambition, they were all of a piece. Politics and law were simply different means of securing justice.
There was a price to pay, and in the early years it included some unease in the comfortable Catholic family. Her father told Lorna Siggins that when he read Mary's inaugural address to the Law Society in Trinity in 1967 he "nearly had a canary - it was all about how contraception, homosexuality and law must be kept apart . . . I nearly had a fit."
Dr Bourke hurried off to consult a friendly canon (named here as McDonald) in Easkey, County Sligo. The canon poured a consoling whiskey and assured the doctor there was no cause for alarm; Mary was giving the paper as a student. The canon in due course became a bishop: was he, perhaps, the Dr McDonnell who is later quoted preaching against contraception and a campaign in which the student, now a senator, lawyer and teacher, played a leading part?
Mary Robinson has, indeed, been considered threatening by some bishops and like-minded politicians, precisely because she is not an outsider railing at the Catholic Church and the conservative parties. Here is someone from an impeccable background, elected to the highest office in the land, who challenged, and still challenges, orthodox positions which she could not be accused of failing to understand.
Lorna Siggins and John Horgan don't offer the last word on the Robinson years, but they capture, in different ways, the sense of excitement, the stirrings of change and the arrival of maturity which made them memorable.
Dick Walsh is an Irish Times staff journalist