To be able to properly answer this question, it is important first to understand what irony is. In short, irony refers to the difference between what you expect and what actually happens.
Irony appears in several different forms in literature. For instance, verbal irony occurs when a character says the opposite of what they mean. In situational irony, neither the characters nor the readers know how the actual outcome will deviate from expectations. However, in dramatic irony, the character or characters are unaware of the situation, but readers know what is actually going on.
In the horrific short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe , the old man fearing robbers is an example of dramatic irony. Readers know what is actually happening, but the old man, the victim, is ignorant. The narrator, although he continually insists that he is not mad, is obviously deranged. He wants...
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to kill the old man, who has never done him any wrong, for no other reason than that he detests his eye, which to the narrator resembles the eye of a vulture. While asserting his sanity, the narrator proves that he is insane by describing his preparation in prelude to the murder, the murder itself, the gruesome dismemberment of the body, and then the hiding of the body under the floorboards.
So the irony in the old man closing his shutters tightly to keep out robbers is that the danger to him is not from without but from within. Although he manages to lock out threats from outside, he does not realize that an insane murderer is closed up in the house with him.
There is further irony in "The Tell-Tale Heart." The narrator covers up all evidence of the murder so thoroughly that he is confident enough to invite the police into the same room in which the crime was committed. However, the beating of the dead man's heart, whether real or imagined, causes the narrator to ignore his elaborate cover-up, reveal the body, and confess to the crime.
It is ironic that the old man fears robbers and intruders when his most dangerous enemy is the mentally deranged narrator living alongside him.
In Poe's classic short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," the mentally insane narrator lives in the same home as the old man and mentions that his primary motivation for murdering the defenseless old man is the ghastly appearance of his pale blue eye. Poe does not give specific details regarding the relationship between the old man and the narrator, but the reader can speculate that they are either related or simply roommates. In either case, the old man trusts the narrator, and the two have a seemingly amicable relationship.
The narrator mentions that he loves the old man and never felt insulted by him. The audience knows that the old man is also wealthy and apparently does not suspect that the narrator would steal his money. However, this does not stop the old man from taking some precautions as he securely fastens his shutters for fear of robbers. The old man and the narrator probably live in a shady, dangerous part of town, and the old man evidently fears intruders.
Ironically, the real threat is not from outside the walls of his home. The old man is living with a mentally deranged murderer, who is carefully plotting his death. Tragically, the old man does not suspect that the narrator will harm him and is completely caught off guard when the narrator attacks him in the middle of the night.