Caroline O'Donoghue: 8 Disparate Thoughts on Hilaria Baldwin

There’s no one on earth I feel more sorry for than the person who comments on a newspaper article with “who cares?” Or worse:

“Sorry why is this news?” Oh, god, these people depress me, and they’re everywhere. The Examiner, thankfully, doesn’t have an on-site comment section, but you see it on many other newspaper sites. You get these absolute horror show people, congregating below every article that isn’t directly about the R number or whether Boris Johnson is building a wall around Northern Ireland. 

Anything with a bit of spark, anything with a bit of curiosity, anything with a bit of human interest, and this lot come charging in. “WHO CARES?” Imagine having horizons so small! Imagine having a curiosity so tiny? They are the battery hens of people, and I want to donate money to alleviate their horrible living conditions.

“Who cares?” I care.

Anyway. On to the pointless news article I clearly feel defensive about enjoying: Hilaria Baldwin. Have you read this one? Alec Baldwin’s wife, who grew up in Boston, has been accused of grifting people into thinking she’s Spanish. This erupted over social media over New Years, and continues to gather steam. She sometimes speaks English in a Spanish accent, usually when talking about Spain or Spanish food. She was born Hillary, yet goes by Hilaria.

She has been on the cover of !Hola! A bunch of times. And the most damning evidence of all: Alec Baldwin appearing on the David Letterman show and saying “My wife is Spanish”.

As with most bizarre things in life, there is an odd yet human explanation for all this. Apparently she spent a lot of time in Spain growing up, her parents now live there, and she, like many of us, has decided to lean into the more interesting aspects of her background when presenting herself publicly.

1. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more sympathy from the Irish press about this, considering vast swathes of the population have been pretending to be Spanish for years. 

Is this a Munster thing? It might be a Munster thing. In 1588, a whole rake of ships planning to invade England crashed into the rocky Cork and Kerry coastlines, scattering sailors and furnishing Irish fantasies for years to come. 

Now, everyone in Ireland who tans well, has dark hair, can pronounce ‘chorizo’, has drank a glass of red wine alone at an outdoor restaurant table, or has taken a nap in the middle of the day, claims to have been descended from ‘the Armada’.

2. Can you blame us, though? 

Irish ancestry is a drag. For a lot of the people born here, our backgrounds are both numbingly similar and startlingly vague. Your story is either very Wind That Shakes The Barley – farms, secrets, the odd Michael Collins conspiracy theory – or very Molly Keane. Big houses, secrets, the odd English lord conspiracy theory. Every so often my dad emerges from the archives with an unsubstantiated story about a woman who we are related to that once drove President Eisenhower to a train station, and tries to get everyone razzed up about it.

3. What makes me feel even more affectionately about the Hilaria Baldwin story, though, is Alec Baldwin’s complicity. 

“My wife is Spanish.” I love it. Is there anything that straight men love more than a short woman who comes from somewhere else? Have I ever met a man with a half-something girlfriend, who didn’t immediately mention it when bringing her up?

Once, my boyfriend and I were eating in an almost-empty Chinese restaurant when a man sauntered in to check out the menu. He was clearly weighing up whether or not he wanted to eat there, and so we said: “The food’s really great! You should come in!” He looked startled, then said. “I would, but my girlfriend is Brazillian.” Then he left.

4. My boyfriend: “I guarantee, that is not the first time today he has said that.” 

5. Then, later, while we were still laughing about it: “The thing is, I do the same thing. I like to ham up having an Irish girlfriend. Makes me sound a bit more interesting.” 

This furthered a theory I had been building for a long time: that if Gavin and I were both Irish, he would be out of my league, but me being a foreigner in his country gives me a sort of below-deck-on-the-Titanic appeal. The ‘manic paddy dream girl’ effect, as I like to call it.

6. I’m not sure what it says about straight men that so many of them see themselves as a one-man embassy for attractive foreign waifs, but I do know that I find it very cute.

7. I’m sure there are lots of conversations to be had here about cultural appropriation, social media, online pretence versus offline realities, but I’m not sure I’m too interested in any of them. 

Let Hilaria Baldwin be Spanish, let Irish people keep the Armada, let the man and his Brazillian girlfriend get married barefoot on the beach. In the words of a thousand online commenters: who cares?