Irish Work is a highly personal book of unseen photographs by Tom Wood taken over nearly half a century. The volume contains over two hundred previously unpublished images centring on Wood's lifelong relationship with Ireland—a personal story and conflict, linked to the wider history of the country. Wood was born to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, who were later forced to emigrate to England; he returned home to Ireland annually, photographing against the backdrop of Nephin mountain. In the late seventies he moved to Merseyside and spent the next twenty-five years there creating many of his best-known pictures—primarily street photographs—while continuing a long-term study of the west of Ireland and the wider landscape of his birthplace and childhood. Family connections are woven through the book but never explained. The pictures are neither chronological nor follow a defined narrative; instead they are presented as a stream of consciousness, shifting stylistically from portrait to panorama, from video to colour and black-and-white, from landscape to interior, from lone figures to social gatherings, with a gentle humour, observational and playful. The book is a collaboration with artist Padraig Timoney, who worked on the sequencing and dust-jacket design.