The Labour Party leader said on Saturday he expects the minority Government to collapse shortly and his party is preparing for another general election within 12 months.

Brendan Howlin was speaking on Saturday after meeting party councillors for the first time since becoming party leader.

Mr Howlin said what the country required was a Government that was agile and had the trust of the people to respond to crisis.

“We don’t have that now. I think we will have another general election in the next 12 months, that would be my view. We have to prepare for that.”

Addressing his party's disastrous election performance, in which it lost 30 of its 37 seats, Mr Howlin wry observed that "if Bill Clinton had been right - and it was all about the economy stupid - we should have fared better at the last election."

“But economic statistics are arid affairs and difficult to excite the public about. And it is the case too that the debate about the last election had a touch of survivors bias about it.”

Mr Howlin said Labour’s opponents Sinn Féin and the AAA/PBP “would have driven the economy into the ground had they been let. We didn’t let them. The economy recovered. Spectacularly.”

He said his party was not given credit for solving the big problem of the State’s solvency and could not solve all of the other problems and suffered as a consequence at the hands of the voters.

Mr Howlin pointed to data this week showing that unemployment has almost halved from 15 per cent to 8 per cent and said this was a statistic that the party should “shout from the rooftops. This is nothing to do with the new Government. It is all our work and we should be proud of it.”

Describing this as an incredible achievement which had directly led to 155,000 people and their families becoming better off, he said it was ironic that this did not work in the party’s favour during the election.