CORK, Ireland — On a rainy day here, Kieran O’Halloran handed out leaflets promoting a “yes” vote in the Irish Republic’s referendum to be held Friday on whether to extend marriage to same-sex couples. “Our time has come,” he said as droplets gathered at the end of his nose. He wiped them away and kept handing out fliers in Cork, the country’s second city, urging passers-by to “give gay people the equality they deserve and release us from the shackles of oppressive Catholic conservatism.” O’Halloran was born in 1993, the same year that homosexuality was decriminalized in the Republic of Ireland. Now, 22 years later, the Irish people this week will have the chance to become the first citizens in the world to vote for marriage equality in a national referendum. While same-sex marriage is legal in 17 countries — including Argentina, Canada and France (plus England, Scotland, Wales, parts of Mexico, 37 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.) — Ireland could be the first country to legalize such unions via the ballot box. Voters will be asked whether to add this line to the constitution: “Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.” In Cork, rain dodgers reacted differently to O’Halloran’s pleas. One beaming elderly woman gave him a high five and urged him to keep fighting all the way to polling day. But a middle-aged man in a gray pinstripe suit told O’Halloran to keep his voice down and stop peddling nonsense. “Don’t take any notice of him,” urged his partner, James. “Some people like to live in the past. Thankfully, though most Irish people aren’t like that guy.”

‘Give gay people the equality they deserve and release us from the shackles of oppressive Catholic conservatism.’ Kieran O’Halloran political activist

Whether that is true remains to be seen. Those pushing for a “no” vote on Friday, mostly religious and conservative groups, maintain that the country is much more evenly split on the controversial issue than opinion polls suggest. They speak of a silent majority of voters. Four opinion polls published last weekend showed the “yes” side had a significant lead but that the gap was closing quickly. Support for a “yes” vote is estimated at 62 percent; similar polls taken last year found support for same-sex marriage stood at close to 72 percent. The “no” side has 25 percent, with the remaining 13 percent undecided. But no one in Ireland is taking the outcome of this historic referendum as a done deal. Many on both sides feel that when polled, some voters respond that they plan to vote “yes” but in the privacy of the voting booth will vote “no.” “There is a ‘no’ voter who is not readily forthcoming. They don’t want to be identified as homophobic or in any way opposed to equality, but that is what they are being spun to be,” said Margaret Hickey, a spokeswoman for Mothers and Fathers Matter, which is calling for a “no” vote. Such groups argue that allowing same-sex couples to marry could result in children being denied the right to a mother and a father. As Ireland has no laws yet on surrogacy, the “no” side warns that same-sex couples would, under the constitution, become parents in this way. And they also fear more same-sex couples will become adoptive parents if marriage equality passes and the constitution is changed.

Those in the “yes” campaign believe children’s issues have nothing to do with this referendum and say the “no” side has introduced them to scare undecided voters. They point out joint adoption by same-sex couples is legal in 21 countries. In Ireland lesbian and gay couples may not jointly apply to adopt, but a single gay person or one partner in a couple may. Recent studies on the outcomes of children adopted by same-sex couples, such as one carried out by Charlotte J. Patterson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, found that children adopted by gay and lesbian couples were virtually indistinguishable from children of heterosexual parents in terms of their happiness, achievement, mental health, social functioning and opportunities. And Abbie Goldberg, a psychologist at Clark University in Massachusetts, found that “gay parents tend to be more motivated and more committed than heterosexual parents on average, because they chose to be parents.” But “no” posters hanging on telegraph polls across Ireland featuring a couple kissing their little baby read, “Children deserve a mother and a father.” In The Irish Catholic, a weekly newspaper, columnist David Quinn, a “no” campaigner and member of the Iona Institute, a socially conservative Catholic advocacy group, wrote, “It’s true that God loves all people regardless of sexual orientation, but that doesn’t mean we have to redefine marriage. If marriage is, by definition, the sexual union of a man and a woman, then any other kind of union is something else and should have a different name. Why is it so hard to see that the sexual and emotional union of a man and a woman is different in kind from any other sort of relationship and ought to have its own special social institution?” All the major political parties in Ireland are calling for a “yes” vote on Friday. Only a handful of parliamentarians say they will vote against the change. The “yes” campaign was bolstered when Minister for Health Leo Varadkar, widely seen as a future prime minister, came out as gay on a national radio chat show in January.

Anti-gay-marriage campaigner and lawyer Eileen King in front of a campaign poster in Dublin, May 14, 2015. Paul Faith/AFP

Current Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who once said he would not back a change to the constitution to allow same-sex marriage, has had a change of heart. A practicing Catholic, he said he believes Ireland should proceed on its journey of continued social liberalization. In an interview with The Independent, he said, “I was reared in the west of Ireland in the 1950s and … I remember the sodalities in the church — the left and right. But you see in respect of contraception and divorce [legalized in Ireland in 1980 and 1995, respectively], the teaching of the church was very clear, and yet the Catholic population of this country took a very different view. The argument was put up that marriage would decline because of divorce, but the marriage numbers [in the Republic of Ireland] have actually increased.” The Catholic Church in Ireland has urged its sizable number of adherents to vote against same-sex marriage in the referendum. At a Sunday service in the Irish Midlands attended by Al Jazeera last weekend, a priest told people to “do the right thing by God and vote ‘no.’” The majority of the congregation erupted into applause, while younger people in the pews sat on their hands, stone-faced. Eoghan Cassidy, a 32-year-old from Longford, said afterward, “That made my blood boil. Who are the Catholic Church to be preaching morals after their involvement in so many child sex abuse scandals over the generations?” Since the early 1990s, a series of criminal cases and government inquiries established that hundreds of children were sexually abused by members of the Catholic clergy in Ireland over decades. And a commission reported in May 2009 going back to the 1940s, many children in industrial schools (set up to care for neglected, orphaned and abandoned children), most of them run by the Catholic Church, were subjected to systematic and sustained physical, sexual and emotional abuse. It also found that the perpetrators of this violence were protected by their religious superiors. In the 1950s and ’60s, thousands of young pregnant Irish women were sent to convents to have their babies away from public eyes. Many of these mothers now claim that they were not allowed keep their children and that they believe the children were adopted by couples abroad. “[The church] played God when they sold these babies to America and elsewhere when their young mothers were in industrial schools and state laundries in years gone by. If I ever had doubts as to how I was going to vote before, I know now that I’m definitely voting ‘yes,’” said Cassidy.