Daniel and Majella O'Donnell have told RTÉ Entertainment that they became involved in the worldwide Campaign for Better Hearing because the issue of hearing loss is very personal to them.
The campaign, which is backed in Ireland by Hidden Hearing, encourages over-fifties to have their hearing tested and educate themselves about hearing loss.
"We got involved because I myself wear hearing aids," Majella O'Donnell explained to RTÉ Entertainment at the Irish launch in Dundrum Town Centre.
"I suffered with a lot of ear infections when I was young, which ended up actually damaging my eardrums. I have about a 70 per cent loss in this [left] ear and about 30 per cent in this ear. So I wear hearing aids, and the difference it made to my life was amazing."
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"It was probably in my late twenties, early thirties that I really noticed it," she said of her hearing loss. "You always compensate; you ask somebody to repeat something, you can turn up the volume. I didn't really notice it until I was at meetings in my job."
Daniel O'Donnell said a hearing aid had made a "huge difference" in his late mother Julia's life.
"It brought her back into the swing of things," he continued. "She would be fine on a one-to-one when you were talking with her. But if we were all in the house together, mammy would be just sitting, as if she wasn't interested.
"She was amazed when she got the hearing aid. We turned the television up to where she would have it and she said, 'I didn't have the TV up that loud!'"
O'Donnell said he thinks older people are reluctant to have their hearing tested because they would "think that it's giving in to something".
"The strange thing about it is that we wear glasses all the time, and I think the reason for that is that you can't manage without the glasses. If you can't see something, you can't see something. If you can't hear, you turn up the sound on the television or the radio, or you ask people to repeat and you do compensate. I think if you just realise the benefit and it doesn't really matter - so what if you have a hearing aid?
When asked whether his own hearing had been affected by all the shows he had played over the years, O'Donnell replied: "I have no 'visible' hearing loss, thank God. But I suppose for the past 20 years I've worn ear monitors. Although they're very close to you, they're not as loud as the monitors would be in years past. But a lot of people in the music business do have reduced hearing.
"In the early days, certainly, the sound onstage was loud, but now, I wouldn't be as loud as the pop or rock! But still, it was loud - there'd be a fair din in your head on the way home after a dance!"
