THE LAST RESORT: 1 Portrush, Co Antrim.Can Ireland's seaside resorts shake off their image of faded glory and offer fun for all the family? In the first of a weekly series, Kate Holmquistand two of her children put Portrush to the test

We're in Portrush, on a peninsula at the north-west corner of Co Antrim, and in the eyes of my two children, this 150-year-old harbour resort is a magical place that deserves its reputation among generations of Northern Ireland children - thanks in part to Barry's Amusements.

Today, Barry's certainly isn't on the scale of a modern theme park, but that's the charm. There are dodgems, a carousel, a ghost train and a suitably scary roller-coaster, as well as some creepy clown puppets near the ceiling that look like they've been perpetually somersaulting around for the past eight decades that Barry's has been here.

Across the harbour, my daughter (12) and son (10) have also been enjoying Waterworld, a smallish indoor playpool (with bowling alley) that has probably seen better days but is well-run and clean, and the perfect size for under-13s. The beach and harbour provide lots more to explore - we've found prehistoric shark's teeth, though this has yet to be confirmed by an expert. We've seen the Giant's Causeway, which was more awesome than we'd expected, and we've imagined swordfights between de Courcys and O'Flynns at Dunluce Castle. We've also walked the death-defying Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge (the one that features in a Guinness ad).

Meanwhile, we've enjoyed conversations with local people who seem genuinely delighted to see people up from Dublin discovering a part of the island once branded "the black North".

Now, we're sitting on a bench outside the Harbour Bar with its five bustling restaurants catering to different tastes and budgets. The original bar is the size of a shebeen and looks like it hasn't been redecorated since the 19th century (fortunately). Around us, locals and tourists gather to enjoy the sun and are happy to talk about how the town has changed.

Michelle McKirgan, up with her mother and two young children from Dungannon, says: "You can't have a summer until you get up to Portrush . . . I think it's all about property and making money now."

Through adult eyes, Portrush is a place in transition, to put it kindly - part picturesque seaside resort, part eyesore and part construction village as investors take advantage of a north coast property boom that is the talk of Northern Ireland. In the past three years, property prices have gone up by 250 per cent, and by as much as 600 per cent in 10 years.

"What they didn't destroy with bombs, they've done with development," says Dr Bob Curran, a historian who lives in nearby Portstewart. "Portrush is like a building site. The traffic is appalling and there is no infrastructure. Builders leave the derelict buildings because they get higher grants if the buildings are condemned. It's very, very unattractive."

IT'S A DIFFERENT place from what it was in 1941, when McKirgan's mother, Dolores Irwin, began her week-long honeymoon before running home after two nights because she missed her mother. "All the knick-knack shops are gone; now it's all about golf and big houses," says Irwin now.

McKirgan brings her children to Fuerteventura, Florida and Spain on their holidays and says that she needs as much spending money for a day in the restaurants and amusement arcades of Portrush as she does for a week at a foreign beach resort with guaranteed good weather. Her brother has just sold an apartment in Portrush, bought three years ago, for a healthy profit. This sums up the new attitude that Portrush has become a town for investors and day-trippers.

New apartment complexes - all in the same cream-coloured cement rendering - stand beside derelict sites and construction projects, while traffic crawls along a baffling one-way system. Former B&Bs where holidaymakers bustled in an out now have signs marked "private residence" and the promenade is strangely quiet. In the old days, say locals, so many families converged on the town that it took 20 minutes to shoulder your way through the crowd from one end of the promenade to the other. Now the walk is a brisk five minutes and, in high season, it feels like the off-season - and not just due to the rain.

"It used to be a great place to take children. Now you hardly see any," says Curran. The new development has "contributed nothing" to the local economy, because instead of spending money in Portrush, families with second homes in the area come up in their four-wheel drives, stocking up at the big stores in Coleraine on the way.

This lifestyle was apparent in nearby Portballintrea, where we stayed at the Bayview Hotel (a newly refurbished 25-room, friendly hotel ideal for families and with great food). The hotels in Portrush itself were booked out - not because Portrush is so popular, but because there are only three hotels left. Portballintrea, on its own little bay, has buildings that look brand-new and it doesn't have a single shop remaining, so if you run out of milk, you have to drive to Coleraine.

DEVELOPMENT MANIA HAS meant that in Portballintrea and Portrush, most traditional businesses haven't been able to resist the temptation to sell up. The result for Portrush has been "very bad infrastructure", Lorraine and David Young tell me. Both keen golfers (David is a former Northern Ireland champion), the couple retired to Portrush 10 years ago and love it here. They don't mind driving to Coleraine to do their shopping, since the town has everything they could want.

The Youngs say that the lack of a four-star hotel in Portrush means that some wealthy golfers often stay on the south coast of Scotland - which you can see on a clear day from the "Causeway Coast" - and helicopter over to the Royal Portrush course. However, Ballygally Castle, at Ballygally Bay (40 minutes from Royal Portrush), recently earned four stars. There are plans to develop the western side of Portrush with luxury hotels and shopping.

"The changes which will take place in the next 20 years will be enormous. We can only hope they do it without losing the 'olde worlde charm'," David says.

Portballintrae and Portstewart still retain their posh reputations, but it's mostly the Northern Ireland upper-middle class from around Belfast who summer in these towns in second homes. Twenty per cent of tourists to the stunning North Antrim coast - which is as beautiful as Donegal and Kerry were before bungalow blight set in - are from Northern Ireland.

Jason Powell says that only 12 per cent of visitors to the North Antrim coast are from the Republic. Europeans make up 18 per cent, US visitors 12 per cent, 24 per cent come from the UK and 8 per cent are from as far away as Australia, China and Japan. Unfortunately for north Antrim, the bus tours speed up the highways from the Republic to see the Giant's Causeway (which gets 500,000 visitors per year), with stops at Bushmills Distillery, Dunluce Castle and the famous rope bridge, but then head straight back down to the motorway to Dublin for the night.

He would like to see tourists using north Antrim as a place to spend two or three nights and to encourage this, Causeway Coast and Glens Tourism Partnership has developed a Causeway Route from Portrush east along the coast to encourage drivers to meander rather than rush; there are also 18 marked walking tours.

Much more has to be done because Northern Ireland has the tourism infrastructure only to accommodate 5 per cent of the tourism that the Republic enjoys. "It's a big test for us to develop the region as a tourist destination, not just a place to pass through," says Powell.

My children won't leave Portrush without extracting a promise from me that we'll come back for a week, perhaps renting one of the many luxury cottages along the coast - which I too would enjoy. North Antrim has so much unspoiled scenery, history and archaeology to offer and it's not too late to develop it sympathetically in a way that preserves its magic. They might even learn from our mistakes south of the Border.

Kate Holmquist was the guest of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board

Next Friday, The Last Resort: Róisín Ingle in Ballybunion