“I’m here for Andrew. I wouldn’t have been involved if it wasn’t for him. If I didn’t have a gay son, I’m not sure I’d be here,” says Eithna Hyland.

She is not one for campaigning, but she wanted to be outside City Hall in Dublin to see off the Yes Equality bus that will visit every county in the State before the May 22nd same-sex marriage referendum. Yes Equality is a national group campaigning for a Yes vote. Mrs Hyland says she is well aware opinions differ on who should be able to get married and believes everyone has a right to their views, but thinks it is all a bit sad.

Religious

“I have three kids and five grandchildren. I’m very religious. I have been a minister of the Eucharist,” she tells

The Irish Times

. So it upsets her to see her children not getting her grandchildren christened.

“But at the end of the day, my other children don’t like the way their brother is being treated. They don’t like the way the church is treating children.”

She thinks they have a point. “We all start off as children don’t we?”

Madeleine Connolly is 90 this week and has "14 children alive" and 33 grandchildren. The Glenageary woman is waving off the bus to support some of her good friends who are lesbian and gay.

“I’m very disappointed with the pope,” she says. “I was sure he was going to be on our side. I’m a Catholic. I go to church. I know that everybody is going to heaven. God made everybody. They will all be in heaven. I don’t like this whole No thing. I say: ‘Keep saying Yes and include everybody’.”

Mrs Connolly is a veteran of the marriage equality campaign. She made a video in 1985 and is about to make another one.

“People should vote Yes because God made us all,” she says. “We should have been kinder to gay and lesbian people before now.”

Mrs Hyland always knew her son was gay. He was still at school when he told her and she “had no problem with it”.

Actually, she had no problem with it until Andrew asked her: “Would you like counselling?” She had no need for counselling, she says. “If you bring children into the world, you love them anyway.”

Difference

Yes Equality spokeswoman Gráinne Healy is a grandmother who hopes the bus will carry “the hopes of all grandmothers and grandfathers for their grandchildren”.

“We have grown up in a country where we couldn’t necessarily disclose our sexuality, so the visibility of having a bus ride into your town is incredibly moving. I think that for women and men over 50, it will make a difference.”

The bus will take in the 26 counties and stop in 66 towns over 27 days before arriving back in Dublin on May 21st, the day before the referendum.

Local marriage equality campaign groups and supportive celebrities will be meeting it and “starting conversations with people and asking them to vote Yes”, says Ms Healy.

“I think there’s something about being a grandmother that makes you fiercely protective of your grandchild and the type of world you want him to grow up in. Since my grandson’s birth, getting a Yes vote is even more important to me. It’s for him. He deserves freedom and equality.”