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Hello, so we had this brainwave of what if we did an episode of newscast, but was the news from the past?

And so did all the things we do in a normal episode of newscast, but applied it to something from recent history.

So here is the product of that brainstorm, the first one anyway. We're going back

for this first episode of old newscast to April 10th, 1998. And we're going to Belfast for the signing

of the Good Friday Agreement. That was the deal that brought to an end 30 years of conflict in

Northern Ireland, which became known as

the Troubles, a conflict which cost more than 3,500 lives. Now, the peak of the violence was probably

in the 1970s, but by the 1990s, it seemed like there was more of a desire for talking and for

reaching some kind of peace settlement. Now, there were a lot of

sides and groups and people in this conflict, but in very basic terms, and this is very basic,

there were those who believed that Northern Ireland should become part of a United Ireland,

such as Sinn Féin, led by Jerry Adams, and the SDLP led by John Hume,

although those two groups disagreed massively on actually how you achieved that.

On the other hand, you had the unionists who saw Northern Ireland remaining as part of the

United Kingdom, and they at that point were led by David Trimble of the Ulster Unionists,

the UUP, and Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionists, the DUP. Now, for two years,

representatives of both those sides generally negotiated over all the issues of peace, trying to

overcome some serious political gridlock. So what do you do when you need to

break a stalemate? You bring in an American, the US Senator George Mitchell, who was America's

peace envoy for Northern Ireland. And he set a deadline for an agreement of April 9th, 1998.

So that is when all the key players, including Tony Blair, who was then the British Prime Minister,

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