When I speak of scientific socialism I speak in terms of bringing about a revolution, bringing about the workers’ republic which Connolly spoke to us about. A workers’ republic to us means one thing and one thing only, the economic domination, the ownership of every factory, mill, and mine in this country, by the working people.

Gliding over the frosty rooftops of a wintry north Dublin suburb, as the voices of the Red Army Choir swell from hushed tones to their full, bombastic chorus, the camera descends into a garden inhabited by a trampoline, basketball hoop, and, at its center, a six-foot marble bust of Lenin. A sharp cut to stock footage of Brezhnev-era Red Square, and to our red-clad, beret-sporting narrator Daracha Nic Philibín, accompanies a tonal shift, as the Alexandrov Ensemble gives way to the synthetic beats of modern-day Belarussian post-punk outfit Molchat Doma. “It’s easy to forget, as we look back at the closing years of the twentieth century, that competing ideologies still remained about how life should be organized.”

Reds! na hÉireann, a new Irish-language TV film on the inner lives of the later-twentieth century Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) from director Kevin Brannigan, evokes in its opening vignette the dynamic medley of contrasts that defined the experience of the Irish Communists, south and north. A montage of the global Cold War — when “revolutionary left-wing groups emerged . . . even here in Ireland” — culminates in grainy film of a rainy Connolly Youth Movement (CYM) march against the Vietnam War, with the Marxist grouping’s namesake depicted on a banner reading: “For Peace and Socialism.”