Sir, – My grandmother, a Berliner, was a Red Cross nurse and a young mother in 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed (Ronan McGreevy, An Irishman’s Diary, June 24th). At the time she had three young children, a disabled husband dying from his war wounds, and she was mourning an only brother who had been killed at the Somme a couple of years earlier.
Her sad state then, as with millions of others all over Europe, would be compounded 20 years later with the outbreak of the second World War.
She lived to see, with relief, the Treaty of Rome drawn up and the entry of Ireland, Denmark and the UK into the EEC.
She would be devastated had she lived to witness the foolish goings-on in the UK today with Brexit. – Yours, etc,
KLAUS UNGER,
Killiney, Co Dublin.