A new RTE/Sunday Business Post poll confirms the finding of an Irish Times opinion poll on same-sex marriage from a few months back, namely that support for the proposition stands in or around 75 percent.

That’s a very big lead. However, this latest poll confirms what some commentators have suspected all along, namely that much of the support for it is soft.

Most tellingly, “49 percent of people said they believed in equal rights for gay people, but had some reservations about same-sex marriage”, according to an RTE report on the poll.

What going on here? Perhaps they see no necessary incompatibility between equal rights for gay people and with regarding marriage as the sexual union of a man and a woman by definition.

In addition, 41 percent have reservations about gay adoption. That percentage would certainly climb if the issue is properly debated which it hasn’t been to date.

Finally, asked whether they believed it is ‘homophobic’ to be against same-sex marriage, 59 percent said it is not and 41 percent said it is. (What happened to the ‘don’t knows’?)

Those advocating for same-sex marriage will certainly start off as the favourites leading into a referendum, but once polling day comes around things will be much tighter as people begin to hear the arguments properly. It can never be ignored that almost every time this issue has been put to the people it has been defeated.