Whose vulnerability? Inverting constructions of older people as a vulnerable group during the coronavirus pandemic in Ireland

This Grounded Theory study analyses social constructions of older people and their care in the official discourses around the Irish government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. The study applies Constructivist Grounded Theory to analysis of official government texts published between January 2020 and March 2021. Pandemic measures in Ireland were among the most stringent in Europe, and governance was heavily centralised, led by medical experts and senior political actors. The discourses produced by these ‘expert’ actors construed older people as vulnerable through disembodying and infantalising language, undermining them as agentic actors, and by contrast, endowing the covid-19 virus with an anthropomorphic agency. Official discourses repeatedly located vulnerability within older people’s bodies, casting risk as susceptibility to death from the virus. Discourse investing the virus with agency instilled crisis temporality and deflected scrutiny from human decision-makers and institutions, particularly when pandemic measures failed. The discursive construction of older people as vulnerable produced a form of biopolitical control where the state positioned older adults as passive recipients of protection, marginalising their voices and undermining their agency. Constructions of older persons as a vulnerable group obscured the real vulnerability of Ireland’s health and social care system and vulnerabilities of the political and state actors responsible for its governance. The article develops the concept of bi-directional vulnerability, whereby states’ and other powerful actors’ failures to address structural conditions (of health and wellbeing) over time create institutional fragilities, while biopower is exercised to mask such vulnerability by deploying discourses assigning inherent vulnerability to specific groups. • Older people constructed as uniformly vulnerable group during covid-19 pandemic in official Irish discourses • Applies Grounded Theory to analysis of 93 textual data sources • Develops concept of bi-directional vulnerability