Professor John FitzGerald:

He was an eternal optimist. He dealt with the subvention and the issue of the pensions in the book. He was very optimistic and thought he would see a united Ireland in his lifetime. The book is rather like the Sinn Féin document; it plagiarised him but did not know it.

A paper was published by ESRI economist Brendan Dowling two years later saying he was actually wildly optimistic. The political system hopes we just look at numbers and we are boring.