In pictures: How 90s rave transcended politics in the North of Ireland

Growing up in Carrickfergus, photographer Gareth McConnell had a strange sense of what was normal. He recalls helicopters landing and taking off, military roadblocks and soldiers “rolling by”, or occasionally men in balaclavas. This was at the height of the conflict known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland/the North of Ireland (McConnell consciously uses both names when he speaks, noting that each is loaded with different political meanings). “The air was so thick with it,” he says. “That was just how I thought the world looked.”

The streets where McConnell came of age were painted with the colours of deep religious and political allegiances, both Protestant and Catholic, Loyalist and Nationalist. The most obvious symbols included the Union Jack and the tricolour flag of the Republic of Ireland, but his photo series Details of Sectarian Murals, 1997-99, also captured territorial murals often painted on the sides of buildings in downtrodden or “ghettoised” areas. “They basically marked out the political boundaries of the country,” he says. “And pretty much the socioeconomic boundaries too.”

In the series, newly presented in the show An Illusion at Stills, McConnell zooms in on these murals to the point of abstraction. Fields of colour meet and break apart; here or there we catch a partial glimpse of a symbol, taken out of context. Factionalist messages are impossible to decipher. The boundary lines blur.

If McConnell grew up in a world where allegiances seemed black and white, his slightly fuzzier outlook can be traced back – at least partly – to a single MDMA pill and a dancefloor at his art college in Belfast. “There was a night at the art college called Sugar Sweet, which was run by the legend David Holmes,” he explains. “I took an E, and had that MDMA experience of complete boundary dissolution. I hadn’t experienced that even with psychedelics, that experience of dancing and loving and hugging other people, total strangers.” He remembers walking home the next morning. “I could hear the birds singing,” he says. “I went into the house and […] into my bedroom, very deliberately got all my old indie records, and carefully put them under the bed. I just thought, ‘I will not be needing you any more.’”

The photographer wasn’t alone in his awakening. Sugar Sweet and rave culture as a whole were known for transcending politics and blowing open the social order. “I remember being in clubs where there was a full paramilitary presence from both sides of the divide,” McConnell says. “People doing drugs, dancing, just getting on together.” And even when the drugs ran dry, the beats put people in a state of “altered perception” about the binary divisions between them, he suggests. “I’ve always been fascinated by the drum beat. It’s the first thing we hear, before we’re even born, the heartbeat. Then rhythms dictate our lives, for better and for worse.” 

The British government also understood the power of the rave scene, and – in England, Scotland, and Wales at least – sought to shut it down. 1994’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act is particularly infamous in its targeting of gatherings featuring “repetitive beats”. “They did not want people getting together and loving each other. They did not want people to transgress the social divides,” McConnell says. “They said, then, that it was the thin end of the wedge and would have profound influence over our future right to protest. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”

Alongside the sectarian murals series, An Illusion features photos of The Stop, a reworking of portraits that McConnell took at the 2003 protests against the Iraq war in London. The faces of the young activists are censored (a piece of advice from McConnell to aspiring photographers: “Don’t get anyone nicked”) and displayed alongside floral imagery, a kind of “retrospective memento mori”.

The exhibition’s name, though, is drawn from a new video work by McConnell. “It’s about 30 years of my archive, mashed together,” he says, soundtracked by a “mad techno beat” courtesy of the duo Smagghe & Cross. Threads running throughout the project include the legacy of rave, as explored in his 2014 book Close Your Eyes, alongside other moments from recent-ish British history, from the Miners’ Strike to the Battle of Beanfield, when in 1985 police attacked New Age travellers on the way to a free festival at Stonehenge. 

In 2026, as young protesters take to the streets across Europe and old divisions rise, McConnell’s work is full of uncanny echoes. It’s a parallel that’s not lost on McConnell himself. “We’re not hopeless enough,” he says of the situation today, of oligarchs ranting on about striking it rich or going to Mars while we sign over more of our lives to the tiny minority in power. “We’re not broken enough to fight back. Our collective stomach for punishment is something else.” But maybe there’s some hope as well, in the moments of transcendence he’s captured over the years. “We’re here on this fucking unbelievable rock, hurtling through space, for this belief glimmer of time, in this playground of beautiful things and creatures and experiences and each other. It can’t just be this.”

An Illusion opens at Stills: Centre for Photography, Edinburgh, on November 20, 2026, and runs until February 27, 2027.