Marty Carr can attest to the trials and tribulations of being the youngest member of a famous golfing family

When your earliest sporting memories are of being dragged out of bed at dawn to catch your brother's fiercely driven golf balls and plunged into the garden pond to retrieve the ones that went astray, a potential passion for the game may be easily dulled.

So while his father Joe was perhaps Ireland's greatest amateur golfer, and two brothers became accomplished players, Marty indulges other people's obsession with the sport, developing and running courses and helping thousands of tourists enjoy them.

Carr Golf brought about 3,000 people to courses in Ireland and Scotland last year, mostly high-end travellers who are happy to hire €1,600 an hour helicopters to maximise their time at the tees.

Carr also operates Links Helicopters to whisk his customers around Ireland, a joint venture with Wayne Huizenga, the owner of the Blockbuster video chain, the Miami Dolphins American football team and Florida Panthers ice hockey outfit.

"I met him through golf, of course " says the avuncular Carr, who lives in Booterstown, Dublin, with his wife and two young daughters.

"But that has been the way for so many things in my life, having a father who was a great Irish ambassador for the game around the world."

As well as dozens of national and regional Irish titles, Joe Carr won three British Amateur Championships, played in 13 Walker Cup team competitions and was the first Irishman to play at the US Masters, which he did three times in his illustrious career.

When he died in 2004, aged 82, his obituary in The Irish Times noted that at consecutive appearances at the US Masters he was paired with Jack Niklaus and Arnold Palmer, both of whom failed to make the cut while Carr progressed to the final rounds.

He was also remembered for playing with US president Dwight D Eisenhower at the Portmarnock club, and borrowing a friend's convertible Rolls Royce for the day to provide suitable transport around the course for the ailing statesman.

Carr says it took his family a while to realise the business potential that went along with their father's reputation, which shone particularly brightly across the Atlantic.

"I went to college in San Francisco and then moved to New York and managed people's money for about five years at the Paine-Webber investment bank," he says.

"Then in 1989 I returned to Ireland and was a director at Dermot Desmond's NCB stockbrokers. But a year later, when I was 26, I knew it was time for a change.

"We decided in the family that the Carr name hadn't been properly leveraged in terms of business.

"Now we build, develop and manage courses, and bring in travellers from the United States and Canada with our companies Carr Golf and Online Golf Travel."

He is also a major player in Ireland's so-called HeliGolf market, operating from Shannon airport with two EC-130 jet helicopters, each of which can carry six people with golf bags and slash travel times between Ireland's 415 courses.

"But Ireland can now be very expensive for golf and it's oversupplied with courses," he cautions.

"I don't see the same potential there as in some other countries." Carr is talking in Budapest, capital of Hungary, a country of 10 million people where less than 2,000 play golf. Of the 4.1 million people living in Ireland, some 400,000 wield the clubs - a dizzying contrast to Carr and his business partners here.

"The opportunity in Hungary is incredible, the market is in its infancy, and there is huge potential for new golfers and new golf courses around the country."

Carr's first project in Hungary is Zala Springs, a €75 million resort in the southwest of Hungary, close to Lake Balaton and its borders with Austria, Croatia and Slovenia.

Tapping the thermal springs that have drawn people to Lake Balaton for centuries, Zala's apartments and villas will be built around a 20,000 sq ft (18,580m sq) spa and a golf course fashioned by renowned course designer Robert Trent Jones II.

After launching the project in Dublin, Zala's developers pre-sold 57 properties on a complex that is not due for completion until late 2007, and will include a vineyard, horse riding centre, tennis courts and cross-country skiing facilities in the winter.

"It is a 500-acre estate, with villages at either side and a river running through it," says Carr. "It will have enough movement to make it interesting but not a chore to play," he says of a course that will echo the contours of the rolling Zala region.

The site was found by Desmond Lewis, a Central European property specialist, who died unexpectedly before the land could be developed. His brother Geoffrey is now chairman of Zala Springs and Desmond's sons are selling properties there. The project is also 40-50 per cent financed by Hungarian banks, according to Carr.

"We would also like to stage a round of the European Golf Tour at Zala, maybe in 2009, and perhaps make it the base for a national academy to bring on young Hungarian golfers," he says, noting the limits of his own ability with the clubs."I've got the name but not the game," laughs Carr, of the high sporting standards set by his father, "Really, we've just capitalised on his reputation,"he says of a man whose integrity was as admired as his golf.