Hi, Namulanta combo here and I'm excited to tell you that my award winning podcast, Dear

Dota, is back for his second season and it's available now. Find out more at the end

of this podcast.

Hello and welcome to the explanation from the BBC World Service. This is where we press

polls on the busy 24 hour new cycle and dig a bit deeper behind the headlines.

Today the West Bank's nightmare started coming true.

Protest is trying to break in there. It's a city where mothers carry guns along with their

groceries.

The spaces that people can run to for safety are shrinking every day here.

I'm Claire Graham and for the help of my BBC colleagues around the world I'll be trying

to get a better understanding of the stories that matter to all of us. Today how the Good Friday

Agreement helped bring peace to Northern Ireland.

On the 10th of April 1998 representatives from the British and Irish governments and the

political parties in Northern Ireland gathered at castle buildings in Belfast to sign an

agreement that would transform relations within Northern Ireland and between Ireland and

the United Kingdom and signal the beginning of the end of the troubles, the conflict that

had cost thousands of lives in over a quarter of a century of bloodshed. So how did it happen?

I'm joined today by Dennis Murray, formerly the BBC's Ireland correspondence.

Sinn Fein, one chunk of the Irish Republican movement which is made up of Sinn Fein, its

political wing as it was known as then and its military wing, the Irish Republican Army,

the IRA, the provisional IRA. Up to 1981 the party was tiny and a very little significance

but there was a series of hunger strikes in the Mays Prison in Northern Ireland of

...