On Tory Island you get a king's welcome - literally. Patsy Dan Mac Ruaidhri, Ri an Oilein (King of the Island), greets every visitor off the island's new ferry with a firm handshake and a hearty welcome. "I'm a very happy king," he says, and with good reason. In an almost miraculous turnaround, the same island that barely avoided evacuation in the early 1980s welcomed almost 10,000 tourists last year. But some islanders are beginning to question the wisdom of turning the three-mile-long island into a mass tourist haunt. "We don't want to become a second Aran Islands," says local artist Anton Meenan. "Some visitors say they didn't meet any of the islanders [on Inis Mor]. They say parts of the islands are owned by people from Dublin who just disappear for the winter. It sounds a bit scary to me," he says. Certain summer festivals are seen to attract an undesirable element. "If you get a lot of people onto a small island it can mean trouble. Some young people come because there are no gardai and they just throw cans of beer around the place and do whatever they like. We don't want to attract that, but it can't be helped."

Meenan once spent the night in the local art gallery after a window was broken, waiting for the troublemakers to get the ferry back the following morning. And for the first time, a garda is to be stationed on Tory and its neighbouring island, Aranmore, from next month, for the rest of the summer. Meenan is the youngest of the island's "primitive" painters, a school of painting established by the English artist Derek Hill more than 40 years ago. The painters were instrumental in bringing media attention to the plight of the island in the 1980s through a series of exhibitions in the US, Britain and Dublin. Tory's cause was also fought by a Jesuit priest, Father Diarmuid O Peic in, who discovered plans to evacuate the island and turn it into either an Army firing range, a quarantine zone or a high-security prison.

Now, a £1 million hotel faces the pier, where work has started on a European funded £4.6 million harbour. Nearby, a hostel, a cafe and an art gallery have sprung up. Perhaps more significantly, 10 families have returned from the mainland, swelling the population from 119 in 1991 to an estimated 165 in 1996. Journalists from Europe and the US visited recently, and photographer Martine Franck (wife of Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson) is completing a book on the island. But it is the ferry link with the mainland that has had the most dramatic effect on Tory Island. Before 1992, the island was accessible to only the most determined tourists, those willing to bag turf onto fishing trawlers in exchange for a bumpy lift across. Since then, with up to five crossings a day in the summer, Tory has welcomed 26,000 visitors, of which 18,000 visited in the last two years (although marching season trouble across the Border has discouraged some visitors this year).

"We want the type of tourist who spends a few days on the island," says Cathal Mac Suibhne, manager of the island co-op, "but unfortunately we have a lot of day-trippers, so we're trying to convince them to stay."

But not for too long. Some visitors have been waving their cheque-books and the locals are worried. "There are visitors coming in now offering money for bits of land," says Anton Meenan, "which would make it difficult for our younger people to buy land for houses. We're lucky in that the old people aren't tempted by money, but it would only take one to break the tradition."

Meenan admits that the media attention which helped save the island is now creating problems of its own. He has warned his own children not to talk to strangers - back when there were few visitors, "we'd be friendly with everybody". However, visitors to Tory can have contact with the local people and culture that is difficult to find elsewhere. One problem on the Aran Islands, according to the chairman of environmental group Faire Arann, Michael Gill, "is that when islanders are working 17-hour days during the summer, they're too tired for the pub. So tourists meet tourists." "For holidaymakers on the mainland, a day-trip to Tory is exciting," says Denis Doyle of the North West Tourism Board, "but retaining the quality of life of the islanders is most important and I wouldn't see us as encouraging mass tourism."

Allowing development of the island to be driven by the marketing of the ferry companies was a big mistake on the Aran Islands, Gill says. On Tory, ferry manager Patrick Doherty estimates that present tourist numbers will have to almost treble before the service is profitable. The islanders' status with officialdom has grown with their inclusion in the recently established Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. In its pre-election "Position Paper on the Islands", Fianna Fail supported island based ferry services and says islanders will have a "meaningful input" into their scheduling. For Patsy Dan Mac Ruaidhri, the tourist numbers are "dead on" at the moment. He says the island will welcome up to 15,000 visitors, and will then consider limiting the numbers. How will they do that? Patsy won't say, but winks coyly: "We won't refuse anyone, we'll just let it be known in a polite way. As we would say, there are more than 20 ways to drink porridge."

Derek Hill still visits the island regularly to paint in a secluded hut, attracted by the constant flux of light and colour. He is proud of the part painters have played in the saving of the island but says it is no longer the island he first went to in 1956. "The whole point of Tory to me was its remoteness," he says. "Then, it was very much out of this world. Now, it is very much in it."