Auf Weidersehn to Berlin

AFTER five years as a labourer on building sites in Berlin, Sean has finally had enough of beer and bratwurst, 70 hour weeks and worrying about getting paid for his efforts. Downing a pint of stout in one of Berlin's numerous Irish pubs this week, the 35 year old Corkman finds his thoughts turning to home.

"It was very good here when it started but now the work is getting scarce and the money is getting worse. Things are so good now at home and in Britain that it's not worth coming here any more," he says.

Hundreds of developers moved into Berlin following reunification in 1990, investing billions in projects that turned the city into Europe's biggest building site. Commercial rents soared, driving many long established - shops and restaurants out of business and forcing firms to move their offices out of the city centre.

Young squatters who occupied derelict buildings in the east of the city, turning them into bars, cafes and nightclubs, have been steadily driven out by developers eager to build more offices.

Meanwhile, the Reichstag is being hollowed out and radically redesigned as the new federal parliament by English architect Sir Norman Foster and a massive building programme is underway to house the chancellor, government departments and members of parliament nearby.

At Potsdamer Platz, a busy square reduced to a border wasteland after the second World War, Daimler Benz and Sony have invested more than 1.5 billion pounds in developing a complex of shops and offices.

Visitors can view the site from the top of the only surviving building, where a guide explains what is happening below, identifying which cranes belong to which projects. Some loo yards away, in the Info Box - a bright red square on stilts - maps, charts, video shows and interactive computer displays provide a picture of how Berlin will look five, 10 or 25 years from now. The Info Box attracts more visitors than any museum or art gallery in the city, as Berliners and tourists alike gaze in wonder at the new metropolis being born.

This and other projects in Berlin's building boom became a magnet for thousands of Irish construction workers, many of who belong to an unofficial foreign legion of builders who travel wherever the work is, from London's Docklands to Barcelona, Berlin and Sydney.

But Germany's sluggish economy and the slow pace of the government's move from Bonn have left much of the new office space empty and taken the gloss off the Berlin boom, and huge losses could force German banks - to close or merge as collapsing property prices transform the German capital from a boom town to a ghost town.

The Berliner Grundkreditbank admitted last week that it had lost more than DM100 million through property investments after a 50 per cent fall in prices since 1994. "We have planned as a precaution for a fall in value of DM100 million. The calculations of many developers are no longer valid," said the bank's chairman, Juergen Bostelmann.

When the French department store, Galeries Lafayette, opened a branch in a spectacular new building by Jean Nouvel on Friedrichsstrasse last year, Berlin's city fathers claimed the tide had turned at last. But the store has failed to attract customers and many other new buildings on the street remain unoccupied.

Rising unemployment has made German builders resentful of the flood of foreign labour working at cut price rates on Berlin building sites had thousands of angry workers protested at the Brandenburg Gate earlier this year, calling for an end to the influx. The city's Baupolizei, or construction - police, have stepped up checks on construction companies to make sure all workers are properly registered and loopholes in the law which allowed foreign workers to avoid tax and social insurance contributions are being closed. The result is a sharp drop in the number of Irish builders in the city and the start of a mass return home.

"There's not nearly as many Irish here this year as last year. The work is tighter and the rates are not as good as they used to be. The fact that things are better at home means it's much harder to get good people to come out here," says one Irish contractor whose company is involved in a number of big projects in the city.

He hopes to stay in Berlin for a further five years but, according to Karen Rothwell, who heads the Irish Trade Board in the city, the upturn in the Irish economy is luring many individual workers home.

"The Irish companies that are serious about working in Germany will stay because there is still work for them. There's plenty of work for individuals too, it's just that there's more at home now. Individual workers only have to think of one job - their own - and they'll go wherever it's easiest," she said.