Mary Robinson: The Authorised Biography by Olivia O'Leary and Helen Burke Lir/Hodder & Stoughton, 326p, £17.99 in UK
High on the list of the most unlikely biographical titles, up there with Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life and Ian Paisley's Roman Holiday, would be Mary Robinson's My Wicked, Wicked Ways. For Irish people in general, this is a good thing, but for biographers of the former President and current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, it leaves the difficult task of exploring a life that is more admirable than enthralling. The stuff of riveting biographies - secret sins, dramatic reversals of fortune - hardly features in Mary Robinson's first fifty-four years.
In confronting that problem, the distinguished team of journalist Olivia O'Leary and sociologist Helen Burke have all the advantages and disadvantages that the words "authorised biography" carry with them. Their book gives an inside view that comes from "a long series of exclusive interviews" with its subject, giving it much more intimacy than previous biographies by Lorna Siggins, John Horgan and Michael O'Sullivan. The price of access, however, is something close to hagiography. There is certainly more personal detail here than ever before. One of the fascinations of Mary Robinson's background in Ballina, where she was born as Mary Bourke in 1944, is that it provides a rare glimpse into the under-explored world of an Irish Catholic upper class that was almost fully assimilated into British rule. The Bourkes with their "one king, one faith, one law" motto and close ties to the old empire are worth a book in themselves. O'Leary and Burke evoke their history to telling effect.
The authors give us, too, an especially strong sense of the cost to Mary Robinson and her family of her early declarations of personal and intellectual independence. That her family disapproved of her marriage to "that big hairy man", as she calls him, Nick Robinson, has long been known. O'Leary and Burke, though, give a painfully vivid account of the breach.
They also describe very well the sheer nastiness of the Catholic Church's response to Robinson's first attempt, in 1971, to reform the laws on contraception. She had a private meeting with the then head of the Irish church, Cardinal William Conway, who "took me to a room and tried to bully me". Her devout parents had to slip out of Ballina cathedral while the bishop denounced their daughter. One local cleric said it was a pity that her mother hadn't practised family planning herself.
In dealing with the more public aspects of Mary Robinson's career, however, the semi-official status of the book is clearly a hindrance. To make things even cosier, the authors almost invariably refer to their subject simply as "Mary". Much of their narrative can be summed up in a sentence that actually appears in a chapter on abortion and divorce but that is implicit throughout: "Once again, Mary was proved right." Even for those of us who think she was right on most important issues, this hardly makes for a challenging read.
This is not to say that the treatment of Robinson's political career, and in particular of her presidency, is dull. There is, in the interviews with other politicians conducted by the authors, a sharp revelation of the extent of tension between Mrs Robinson and senior Labour Party figures.
Dick Spring is remarkably frank about his reasons for not appointing her Attorney General in 1984 ("Mary Robinson as attorney general would have been a free agent and ahead of the political agenda of the day"). Ruairi Quinn describes her perceived ingratitude to those who had worked to elect her as "outrageous". The tensions between Spring and President Robinson on issues such as the UN and the Gerry Adams handshake are laid bare. So, too, is the low-intensity conflict between Robinson and the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, in the early days of her presidency. There is a hilarious description, straight from the archives of Scrap Saturday, of Haughey's wrath when Robinson had a Saint Patrick's day message broadcast in the United States. The man responsible was the then head of Bord Failte, Martin Dully. He recalls being summoned to the Chas Mahal: "A man called P.J. Mara met me at the door wringing his hands. He said: `The Boss is in terrible form. You're going to be bawled out. He's upset.' "
Because this is essentially Mrs Robinson's account, though, we don't get a broader perspective on this row. We are given her assessment of Charles Haughey: "complex and resourceful, always interesting though ruthless." But we don't get Haughey's view of her, even though the authors imply that they know what it is. As so often in Irish politics, moreover, Haughey's departure signals a loss of entertainment value and the book becomes an ever more dutiful exercise in praising a famous woman.
Even the failures of her presidency are treated kindly. When it is hard to prove Mary right, there is generally someone else to blame. The softness is evident in the way the book deals with Mrs Robinson's controversial visit to Argentina. She failed to get to a poor suburb of Buenos Aries even though the local community was expecting her. On the one hand, she accepts here that she ought to have insisted on fulfilling the engagement in spite of objections from the Argentine government; on the other, she is allowed to pass the blame on to the local Irish ambassador. It's a similar story with the other controversy during that tour - Mrs Robinson's handshake with the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. O'Leary and Burke report that, immediately before it happened, "At President Robinson's request, the . . . authorities ordered the RTE camera crew to leave the reception room" so that the Irish people would not see images of it on the news. A more objective biography might have something to say about such blatant censorship. Here, it is allowed to pass.
In a sense, too, this book is written too soon. The real test of whether Mary Robinson is a suitable subject for a raft of biographies will be how she copes with the immense challenge of the UN human rights commissionership. It is interesting to note that when the UN crops up in the interviews with her here, it is often as an image of dead language and mad bureaucracy.
The worst thing she can think of saying about early American feminist literature is that it was "like UN-speak". The worst thing she can say about her time in the Labour parliamentary party is that "it prepared me for the UN. It was all horrifically long-winded, and there would be some item on the agenda that I wanted to discuss and we would never get to it, and if we did, they weren't interested." If that is what she is now finding in her new job, a darker, more complex and more absorbing chapter of her life story is yet to be written.
The paperback edition of Fintan O'Toole's A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan was published recently