Tanaiste Leo Varadkar has confirmed that the planned reopening date for Irish pubs and restaurants will not be changed.
Taoiseach Micheal Martin confirmed in an address to the nation last week that outdoor dining will be returning on June 7.
And that date will not be changed despite the "chaotic" party scenes witnessed in Dublin and other cities across the country last weekend.
Mr Varadkar admitted that the government considered the possibility of allowing the hospitality sector to return earlier than scheduled, but said that idea had been ditched.
He told Newstalk: "The decision is Monday [June 7] and that's what's going to happen. That's the Cabinet decision on that.
"We did toy with that possibility but we're not going to change it now. It does appear that the weather is not going to be so nice this weekend, unfortunately, but that's probably a good thing in terms of people congregating outside."
Over the weekend Gardaí were forced to clear large numbers of people from St Stephen’s Green, South William Street and areas of Cork and Galway, with a series of arrests being made for public order offences.
However, the Tanaiste stressed that while these scenes were unfortunate, they're not representative of the larger situation.
He explained: "I will say this though, I didn't like seeing the scenes that we saw in South William Street, or some of the problems that we saw in Cork and places like Portobello Plaza. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we are actually encouraging people to be outdoors. Outdoors is much safer than indoors.
"What I saw around town was people gathering in the outdoors responsibly, sitting in relatively small groups. It's important to note that I think there's a risk always when a video goes up on Twitter of a certain number of people misbehaving in a certain number of places. There can be a bit of an overreaction to it.
"The vast majority of people are following the guidelines, they're meeting up in back gardens in groups of no more than three households and if they aren't meeting in parks. They're keeping the numbers really small."
Mr Varadkar also called on the Dublin City Council to do more to deal with the crowds, including installing more bins and bathrooms.
He added: "For a start, I'd like to see more bins. I spent a bit of time on Sunday around Herbert Park and there were more bins, but they need more too.
"I would definitely like to see more provision of public facilities and public loos. Having said that though, we think we may be able to get around that by allowing premises to reopen their bathrooms for the public to use - for example, pubs, restaurants, shops to allow people to use"
