A further 27 deaths and 156 new cases of Covid-19 were confirmed on Friday evening.
The latest figures bring the death toll in the Republic of Ireland to 1,429 and the total number of confirmed cases to 22,541.
The Department of Health announced the new cases at a press briefing.
Earlier today, Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said the health experts believe that Ireland has done better than many of its neighbours when it comes to flattening the curve.
Speaking on RTE Radio One's Today with Sean O'Rourke, he said: "We can look at our countries in western Europe.
"If you look at the path of infection in this country, we think we have done well if not better than most countries.
"I'm also talking about countries to the west of Europe, and also when you look at the nursing home sector, that has been a challenge, if not to the same extent, a much larger extent in the countries we look at in western Europe.
"Many of those countries have done been able to suppress the infection as well as we have done in this country.
"The only way we have certainty in preventing the spread of infection to people in vulnerable groups, whether they're in nursing homes or whether they're in the community at large, is to first suppress the infection in the population at large as we did."
More than half of the country's deaths have been in nursing homes.
However, Dr Holohan insisted that visitors did not bring the virus into the facilities.
He said: "People would have picked up that infection, people who would have worked in nursing homes and that's the mechanism through which it gets into nursing homes.
"But it didn't get in through visitors and it's important that people know they're not implicitly to blame for visiting a loved one at the wrong time. It is not their fault."
