Monday July 26th is the planned re-opening day for indoor dining, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar says.
He says that is the day Government hopes indoor hospitality will be able to resume for the first time this year.
He says work is underway to finalise the guidelines for that re-opening - along with plans for an app reader.
"We're getting things in place, it looks like we're going to have an app reader that restaurateurs and publicans can use to verify that the COVID Cert is valid and so on.
"A lot of good work is being done on that, and we're kind of targeting Monday the 26th.
"It has to go through the Seanad, we need to allow the President time to consider the bill and sign it.
"And we need to get some regulations and a few things like that in place".
Taoiseach Micheál Martin says there is an element of risk to re-opening, but it will be managed.
"I have concerns, obviously, with the Delta variant of course - and I said in the Dáil last week there are risks.
"But Delta is now rising even prior to the opening of indoor dining and indoor hospitality.
"But it's a substantially different situation, obviously, to the Christmas period - in that the majority of people eligible for vaccination are fully vaccinated.
"And we've very high numbers with one dose vaccination".
'Incidence rate increase'
It comes as 994 new cases of the virus were reported in Ireland on Thursday.
Latest available figures also show there are 80 people in hospital with the virus - 22 of these in ICU.
At an earlier briefing, HSE CEO Paul Reid warned that cases will continue to rise every day.
He says: "Yesterday we saw one of the highest number of cases in one day since February, at almost 800 cases.
"And we know and expect that today's cases will be approximately 1,000.
"So any kind of look forward ahead will clearly demonstrate this is on a very significant raise of case numbers.
"Data from the WHO demonstrate COVID incidence rates within Europe shows that the 14-day incidence rate in Ireland has increased by 50% compared to where it was two weeks ago.
"And we're now the eighth highest out of 31 countries".
