A call for a deer cull by Tipperary TD Jackie Cahill has been met with mixed views.
Deputy Cahill said the deer population needs to be controlled after a deer jumped out in front of his car on Sunday.
"Did a nice bit of damage to the car," he told Newstalk.
"Thankfully no personal injuries and the deer jumped into the ditch and sped across the fields.
"The issue of deers and road safety is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as the population of deers is expanding at an accelerated rate.
"The deer population now is so high in an awful lot of counties, it's causing a serious safety hazard on our roads and also doing a lot of environmental damage".
Gina in Kildare told Lunchtime Live that something needs to be done.
"We're riddled with deer here," she said.
"In the summer in our crops, I've often counted 26-plus deer out grazing on the crops.
"Definitely a few times a year there's dead [deer] on the side of the road, where - obviously no one's been hurt - but the deer had a horrible death and being hit by a car.
"The disease they bring in: we've heard of deer tagged in west Wicklow and being shot in Offaly.
"They're that riddled with TB, you wouldn't believe the lesions... they carry other things.
A Fallow Deer stag makes his intentions known to a herd in the Phoenix Park, Dublin in October 2022. Picture by: Eamonn Farrell/Rollingnews.ie"For horse breeders, they're a curse: if you them you have to vaccinate twice... If you don't do that, you start losing foals around November/December.
"There's too many: the sick ones aren't getting culled out, and we're absolutely riddled here".
She said they have real concerns about tuberculosis.
"We had a sick one in our garden two years ago and we could never find who to get permission from, because it was in the middle of summer and it was outside the shooting season, to have it shot.
"For the life of us, we didn't want to let the kids out there in case it was carrying something.
"TB in particular, they are riddled with it, and the amount of fencing we have to put around our oak and ash - you wouldn't believe it".
'We don't know how many we have'
John in Waterford said he believes picking up a gun is not the answer.
"I represent the Association of Hunt Saboteurs, and deer is an issue in Waterford," he said.
"I just want to step back from this for a second - whenever in Ireland there is a perceived problem with animals, with wildlife, the first option is 'Get the gun, let's kill them'.
"The situation in Ireland at the moment is that, of the four deer species that we have in this country, we simply don't know the independent scientific evidence of the population densities of these species.
"We don't know how many deer we have in this country.
"So it's very easy for vested interests - like farmers, shooters - to say 'We have too many deer, we've got to kill them'.
"We don't have that factual evidence that says that deer do need to be controlled.
"For some reason in this country, everything is 'Get the gun, kill the wildlife, problem will be solved'.
"That's not conservation whatsoever, that's just being cruel to animals for the sake of being cruel.
"We just cannot be looking at wildlife as something that's against us; we should be working with wildlife," he added.
