Jun. 5--In a town where Irish pubs are as abundant as Red Sox hats, there is apparently only room in Boston for one establishment named Kitty O'Shea's. 

But whether that honor should go to the quaint pub in Boston's financial district owned by two Irish brothers or to the lobby bar inside the Hilton hotel at Logan Airport may come down to this: Is Boston's connection to Ireland stronger than its link to Chicago? 

The two sides are fighting in federal court in Boston over the trademark right to the name Kitty O'Shea, the married Englishwoman whose scandalous 19th century affair with Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell led to his downfall. 

The verdict may hinge on whether the Kitty O'Shea's that has been operating in the Chicago Hilton and Towers since 1986 has gained such notoriety, extending to Boston, that Hilton should have the sole right to use the name here. 

The pub's manager thinks so, telling jurors yesterday that the bar attracts conventioneers from around the country. He noted that a scene from Harrison Ford's movie "The Fugitive" included a fleeting glimpse of Kitty O'Shea's horse and cart in Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade. 

But Brian and Kevin Loughney, who opened the original Kitty O'Shea's pub in Dublin in 1981 and expanded to Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and Barcelona, before opening in Boston in 1999, insist that Hilton's copycat bar couldn't possibly have greater local name recognition than theirs. 

The Dublin pub has hosted events for Senator Edward F. Kennedy and former President George Bush, when he was vice president, according to the Loughneys. 

"It's like someone coming in and drinking your cup of tea. The name is ours, very much so," said Kevin Loughney, adding that it's cost him and his brother $250,000 in legal fees to battle the Hilton chain, in the case he's dubbed David v. Goliath. 

During her opening remarks to the jury on Monday, New York attorney Doreen L. Costa, who represents Hilton Hotels Corp., acknowledged that hotel executives took the Kitty O'Shea name from the Loughneys after visiting their Dublin pub in the mid-1980s. 

"We had the right to use it in Chicago," said Costa, adding that the Loughneys had no legal standing to prevent anyone from copying the name back in the 1980s because they weren't doing business in the United States. 

While Hilton's Kitty O'Shea's is wildly popular in Chicago and brought in $25 million in revenue between 1986 and 1998, the California-based hotel chain didn't attempt to expand to other cities until 1997. 

Boston attorney William Boesch, who represents the Loughneys, told jurors that when Hilton learned in 1997 that the brothers were building a Kitty O'Shea's in Boston and had filed an application to trademark the name, executives raced to open a Boston pub of their own. 

While the Loughneys were purchasing stained glass scenes of Ireland and importing an Irish church pulpit made of pitch pine to be used as the bar at their Boston pub, the Hilton hastily posted a brass "Kitty O'Shea's" sign on an existing sports bar inside the Hilton-owned Ramada Inn at Logan Airport, Boesch said. 

The first "bona fide" use of the Kitty O'Shea's name on a Boston pub was by the Loughneys, when they opened their establishment on State Street in February 1999, said Boesch. 

The Ramada Inn at the airport was torn down later that year and in September 1999, the new Hilton Boston Logan Airport Hotel was opened with a Kitty O'Shea's pub in the lobby. 

Hilton insists it staked its Kitty O'Shea's claim in Boston first -- although it didn't seek to trademark the name until 2000 -- and urged the three-woman, six-man jury to consider all of the "unsolicited" media attention enjoyed by Kitty O'Shea's in Chicago -- where local TV crews shoot every St. Patrick's Day. 

Jurors weren't told that there is another Kitty O'Shea's pub located north of Boston, in Beverly. It opened in December 1996, more than two years before the Loughneys or Hilton came to town. 

Al Lane, a co-owner of the Beverly pub, said he didn't know anything about the trial over trademark rights and was happy not to be part of it. 

"We hadn't heard about them before," said Costa, adding that Hilton wasn't looking to get into more legal disputes over the name. She said the chain felt it had to sue the Loughneys when they tried to gain the national trademark right to the Kitty O'Shea name. 

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