The National Trust is against plans for a golf course at the edge of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. Photograph: Paul Faith/PA

We have the occasional urge to just say no, site unseen. Anything with the name Trump  attached, especially if involving golf and Scotland, is generally a good candidate. This is another one:

Conflict is synonymous with the Giant’s Causeway. Children in Northern Ireland are weaned on the legend of how its rugged landscape was formed when the giant Finn MacCool confronted his Scottish rival, Fingal, by hurling rocks into the sea.

A more prosaic, but no less violent, explanation for the causeway’s genesis attributes the creation of its 39,000 hexagonal, basalt stones to a series of volcanic eruptions 60m years ago.

Now the causeway is at the centre of conflict again. The National Trust, one of the UK’s most formidable campaigning organisations, is seeking to thwart the development of a £100m golf course on the edge of the causeway, Northern Ireland’s only Unesco world heritage site.

The trust, which is charged with protecting the site, is using a judicial review to challenge the Northern Ireland government’s decision to grant planning permission to a five-star resort that will boast a clubhouse, 120-bedroom hotel and 75 guest suites.

With its potential to create hundreds of jobs, many see the development of the Bushmills Dunes golf course as a major regeneration project. But the trust disagrees, on the grounds that the course, which would be 500 metres from the causeway, lies within a “buffer zone” that Unesco, the UN’s heritage watchdog, says must be protected.

Now the looming legal row, which is due to commence on 9 January, could become a defining event for Northern Ireland, one that says much about how it sees itself.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors pour on to the causeway each year to marvel not only at the site, but at its breathtaking views all the way down to Donegal and over to Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre, 16 miles away. One enthusiastic visitor was the prime minister, David Cameron, who went during the Olympics and talked of how tourism could help to secure Northern Ireland’s prosperity.

But how this vision is to be realised lies at the heart of the row, one that will have consequences not just for the causeway but, potentially, for the UK’s other 27 Unesco-listed sites.

After the opening of the acclaimed Titanic Belfast centre in the spring, the row over the right to fly unionist flags has given an ugly, sectarian turn to the end of the year, and now Northern Ireland stands at a crossroads. In its past it sees a poor country blighted by the Troubles, but rich in history, folklore and natural beauty. In its future, it sees potential to become a modern nation exemplified by the success of its golfers, including 2011 Open champion Darren Clarke and the current world No 1, Rory McIlroy.

These two, along with former US Open winner Graeme McDowell, have done much to put Northern Ireland on the golfing world’s map. But Bushmills Dunes, say its supporters, would take the country into a different league. Alistair Hanna, the New York-based developer behind the scheme, talks passionately about its potential to make Northern Ireland the “gold standard” in links golf. The course’s designer, David McLay Kidd, has promised Hanna: “If I can’t get your course into the top 50 of the world, you should shoot me.”

The development would see a desolate place of dunes and scrub that looks out to where the North Atlantic melds with the Irish Sea replaced by lush greens and a labour-intensive landscape, at odds with the natural environment. James Orr, of Friends of the Earth, has likened the development to “a drive-through burger bar at the Taj Mahal”.

Inevitably, parallels have been drawn with the controversy that surrounded Donald Trump’s £750m golf resort in Aberdeenshire, with Hanna playing the part of the unloved US billionaire. But the comparisons with Trump can be overblown. A former McKinsey consultant and Harvard graduate, Hanna was born in Northern Ireland and has many friends in the province, which he still visits regularly.

The majority of local politicians and businessmen seem to be behind the plan. Ian Paisley Jr, a Democratic Unionist MP, described the trust’s opposition as a “disgrace to Northern Ireland”. Golfers are also supportive. Clarke has attacked the trust for trying to block a project that he said would create 360 jobs for the local economy.

Read the remainder of the story here.