‘Each of us is responsible for all of us’: solidarity and national responsibility in Irish leaders’ COVID speeches

This chapter investigates the construction of solidarity and shared identity in speeches delivered by Irish political leaders during the most extreme period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on the strategic inclusion of language and content referring to Irish identity in these speeches to establish a sense of community and shared responsibility. To achieve this, we take a corpus-driven approach to our data to establish the salient linguistic characteristics of the speeches, which leads to a focus on pronouns as items which index solidarity, shared responsibility, and national identity in the speeches. This is aided by a conceptual framing which adapts theories related to stance, footing and participation. Findings show that Irish political leaders were concerned with creating a sense of social solidarity by promoting inclusion of all citizens in the effort to suppress the virus and used phrases such as each and every one of us and we can beat this together to forge a discourse and sentiment of communal action.