No effort to publicly mark VJ Day in the south, despite Irish sacrifice

I am puzzled that there will be no public marking of VJ Day 70 in the Republic on the weekend of August 15. 

There will be a ceremony in Belfast on Friday, August 14, in the Memorial Gallery. The official view in Dublin appears to be that there was no World War II and that, consequently, no Irish citizen, military or civilian, could have been involved.

I appreciate the niceties of the neutrality of the Irish Free State and the relative comfort and peace of the Emergency, which I enjoyed myself. However, for many Irish citizens (and their descendants or relatives), the situation was more complicated.