When the sun spilled itself this week the cars poured into Ballybunion, and the trade in the holiday town was brisk bordering on good. And when the rain came the money left town and, standing on the empty beach, you could almost hear the chatter of the amusement arcades on Main Street.

Ballybunion has a split personality. The town still tricks itself out for the old-fashioned family holiday trade. The place is dotted with amusement arcades and budget hotels, but Jackie Healy-Rae jokes notwithstanding, it exists as a symbol of the difficulties facing north Kerry.

And a fairway's length down the road is one of the great golf courses of the world. The Old Course at Ballybunion is variously hailed as "one of the true shrines and treasures of the game" (Ben Wright, CNS golf commentator); "the best place in the world for the golf enthusiast" (the late Peter Dobereiner, doyen of golf writers); and "a course on which many golf architects should live and play before they build golf courses" (Tom Watson, five times British Open champion and next year's club captain).

Ballybunion has no major factories and its nearest neighbour, Listowel, lost two of them in the last couple of years. The railway closed in 1932 and not much has opened since then. Tourism is the lifeblood of the place and even then Ballybunion as a town has its cap pitched at the wrong market.

The beach and the amusement arcades, the bachelor festival and the unreliable weather are difficult things to sustain in tigerish times. As it stands, the biggest week of the year is the Listowel Races, 12 miles up the road.

The irony is that snuggled up close to the town's back door Ballybunion has one of the greatest sporting attractions in the world, a beautiful seaswept masterpiece of a golf course full of tight fairways, mean greens and the most devastatingly beautiful scenery of any course in the world.

And that is the nub of the controversy which gently divides opinion in the town at present. All are agreed that a way must be found of making the golf course clientele leave more money behind in the town. The question is how.

Jackie Hourigan, chairman of the town's development committee, sees Ballybunion as being at a crossroads.

"The golf market in terms of visitors paying green fees is fairly full as things stand. The challenge for Ballybunion is growing the non-golf market and that part of the market which is ancillary to golf. Getting people to stay here, to eat in restaurants and spend money around the town. There are a lot of people who pass through Ballybunion with lots of money and they don't leave much more behind than a green fee. Very few of the world's great courses are run that way."

Last September the club was approached by Murphy's, the beer company which sponsors the Irish Open, and asked if it would be interested in staging the first Irish Open of the new millennium. The club was cautiously interested. Tom Watson, the legendary American golfer and a long-time friend of Ballybunion, had agreed to be the club's captain for next year. An Irish Open with Watson and other big names would be a four-day advertisement for Ballybunion and its beauty.

It seemed this was the chance the club had always wanted. In 1995 it had prepared a glossy burgundy-covered brochure about the club for presentation to potential competitions. The brochure was a brief study of what the course offered and analysed playability, wind factor, watering systems, infrastructure etc.

The first fly in the ointment of Ballybunion's contentment came this spring when this year's committee sought to update and expand upon the information provided in its previous study. An examination of the course by a long-time friend and fan of the place, Dr Tom Kavanagh, an agronomist in UCD, raised serious concerns about the damage which large crowds of spectators would cause to the grasses and dunes of the course.

By way of supplementary evidence the committee can point to the example of the Royal Birkdale links in England, which are still recovering alarmingly slowly from the experience of hosting last year's British Open. The course had crowds five times as large as the maximum anybody anticipated might visit Ballybunion, but it had 250 acres on which to accommodate those crowds. Ballybunion, whose compact delicacy is integral to its charm, has just 124 acres of land to play with.

THE committee responded to Dr Kavanagh's concerns by requesting that the crowds for the duration of the competition be limited to 4,000 a day. Given that this included some 700 volunteer workers, 2,000 members and the sponsors' complimentary tickets would take up most of the rest, Ballybunion was effectively asking for the competition to be held in private. Furthermore, it was insisted the instructions of Dr Kavanagh be obeyed to the letter during the tournament.

Murphy's, whose managing director Padraig Liston is a native of Ballybunion, found the proposals hard to swallow, and suddenly Ballybunion found itself being ridiculed on radio phone-in programmes, being scolded even by those who wished it well and being excoriated by those involved in tourism in towns such as Tralee and Killarney and even Listowel. Gift horses aren't to be looked in the mouth.

The dispute hasn't been bitter: people on opposite sides still play in four ball competitions together at weekends on the course, but it has been intense. Many members feel that a limit of around 10,000 people per day would satisfy everybody and bring the Open to Ballybunion, which in turn would be brought to the world.

"Look at the beauty of this place," says Mike Nagle, who has been a member since 1964 and who caddied there as a child. "Imagine the opportunity we have. Tom Watson hasn't played an Irish Open since 1975. To have him here and whatever players he might persuade, that is going to bring Ballybunion to an audience all over the world. We had a small taste of what could follow from that with the Clinton visit. We need more."

Nagle, and his fellow member Eric Browne, have gathered the 50 members' signatures necessary to call an extraordinary general meeting of the club which will be held on Monday week to finally thrash out the issue.

"I think that we are all singing from the same sheet on this issue: we all want what is right for Ballybunion. The fact is that some of us sincerely believe that the Open would be of immense value to the club and the town."

That value is undoubted. The economic impact of the four days of golf could run as high as £10 million in the area. In the long term, if Ballybunion can capitalise and redevelop its hotel business to cater for the affluent golf tourism market, the results can be even better.

"At present," says Jackie Hourigan, "the golf club is the second-biggest business in north Kerry after the Kerry Co-Op. A big percentage of the tourist traffic in June, July and August is golf-related, but more than that in the shoulder months in April or May and September nearly all the business comes through golf."

With 38 full-time staff and 80 more employed during the summer and an annual wage bill tipping the £1 million mark, the club is already growing faster than the town. The immense club house which dominates one end of the Old Course was opened in July 1993 at a cost of £2.3 million. Further investment on that scale in terms of hotel accommodation would copperfasten the course's earning capacity.

From the outside people have sought motives for Ballybunion's reluctance. Meanspiritedness, they say. The club's remarkably low annual membership fee of £180 a year was seized upon and members were accused of being motivated by a fear that their fees would increase. Both sides of the argument in Ballybunion dismiss that.

The criticism from outside has hurt those on both sides of the argument. The club, for instance, is adamant that it never applied to host the Ryder Cup in 2005.

"We wrote away," says Fintan Scannell, the club captain, "and asked what criteria would apply for a course seeking to host it. We got back a vague letter with a lot of criteria which were purely financial and we never replied, never took the first step along the road."

"I think that the committee have to take the long-term view. If we allow people all over the course and Dr Kavanagh's analysis proves to be correct, which we believe it would, then we are left with a badly damaged course, maybe worse. There is a short-term gain but nothing else."

Looking out over the course it is easy to sympathise with both sides of the argument. Ballybunion badly needs money pouring into it. Yet the course is small and compact, and until an international fund-raising campaign saved it in the late 1970s traditionally struggled to hold its own against the battering of the hungry Atlantic.

"The PGA will send in its people six to eight months before the tournament begins." say Scannell. "They will place restrictions and put in place a plan for manicuring it. Three to four weeks before the tournament the course will be closed. The members are aware of that, but the more of them who come to the e.g.m. and listen to the concerns raised by Dr Kavanagh, who loves and cares for our course, the better."

Even if the e.g.m. overturns the committee's decision on restrictions a lot still depends on the attitude of Murphy's. Right from the start it was made clear that the Irish Open could only be held in Ballybunion if there was significant money coming in from the Minister for Sport (Ballybunion has not been informed what sort of money) and a sponsorship contribution from five local firms. Murphy's may decide that the entire adventure is just too much trouble.

In the meantime Ballybunion must decide. "Democracy at its best, " says Fintan Scannell. "There are hard decisions to make. We can only offer the best advice of professionals. There will be no resignations or recriminations. We all have the course at heart and it's up to the members to decide. Thank God for that."