Former Leinster Rugby player Shane Byrne has said any attempt to ban tackling in school rugby would see other sports banned as well.
It follows comments from a group of academics in the UK, who said children should be banned from tackling when they play rugby at school to protect them from brain injuries.
Experts from three English universities said they have concerns about the potential impact on young, developing brains of repeated concussive blows.
But Shane told Newstalk Breakfast that this would stifle the sport.
"Where do you go with this, Claire, that's the problem - we just don't know enough about the brain injuries - there's something here that every precaution is being taken in it.
"Yes, you've got to teach proper tackle technique and everything like that - but if you're taking away the risk of the 'what if, what could happen', where does that stop?
"Any physical exercise that is going to put a child in a position where his head might get jiggled around - do we eventually just put it into that scenario?"
He said other sports such as horse-riding, soccer and hurling could be affected by such a move.
"The problem I have with this whole concept is that the logic isn't sound, because what's the story with the hundreds of thousands of people who have played rugby - for example - all the way through their lives and never had any issues".
"We just don't know enough, we don't know why some people are more susceptible to it than others".
Dr Colin Doherty is a consultant neurologist at St James's Hospital and senior lecturer at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
He said he is not in favour of banning tackling, but that things need to change.
"The idea that we need to modify the exposure of children to head injuries seems very reasonable to me.
"The evidence that individual knocks on kids have serious impact is very low, but there is accumulating evidence that - over the lifetime - the dose of head injuries that children are getting... may be significant in terms of developing problems in later life".
He said one such solution could be to stop contact during training sessions, such as the US NFL has done, and reinstate it during actual games.
"That's reduced the dose of serious contact by approximately half".
