As it becomes clear that Irish voters have turned away from the Coalition parties, the postmortem is in full-swing.

Pat Rabbitte told Newstalk that "people were waiting in the long grass" to vote against the Governing parties.

The big issue for The Labour Party now is to start looking at how to "rebuild," according to Mr Rabbitte.

Pressure is mounting on both Enda Kenny as the leader of Fine Gael, and Labour leader Joan Burton.

Speaking on the Colette Fitzpatrick Show, the former minister said that it would be unwise for a party leader to step away in these circumstances, "without giving the party a few months," to come up with a strategy to reorganise.

Former Fine Gael TD Olivia Mitchell also took part in the panel discussion, she believes that commentary around the vote has focused too much on the three-week campaign before the election, saying, "I think the last thing from people's minds in Fine Gael, those elected and not elected is the leadership of the party ... I don't think it's time for the blame game.

"To be honest, my own view is that it didn't matter who was leading us - it didn't matter what kind of a campaign we had - it didn't matter what slogans we had - what advisors we had," she added.

Ms Mitchell concluded that "People had made up their minds before we started knocking on doors or started the official campaign," despite Fine Gael scoring strongly in opinion polls before the final run-in to the General Election.