Sky’s the limit for innovative business pair Rachel & Mary
Couple hand-picked for Tech scholarship and are flying the flag for Irish women
Meet the young Irish women taking the world by storm, handpicked for Sky’s Tech scholarship with their innovative gaming and farming concepts. Limerick native Rachel Clancy left her job as an advertising art director to develop a game she has made called ‘Get Closer’, where players open dialogue with a forest creature who needs their help.
The game teaches young people how to talk about emotions and support themselves and others through mental health issues.
Mary Murphy, 20, alongside her twin sister Sarah was a CEO at 16 years old after designing and manufacturing the Sheep Marking Gun to help on her family farm.
Rachel, 27 told the Irish Mirror: “I came to London in 2016 to work for an ad agency, but I took time out to pursue a Masters as it was my last opportunity to move up to a mid way creative.”
Rachel and her 32-year old girlfriend Aida Sancho Lopez are now working on a game called, A hero’s guide to gardening.
She said: “We made a quick little project called Get Closer for Game Jam in 2019, we pulled together a game in 24 hours and we won the contest.
“We brought this to Sky originally and then we came up with the concept of a game to help young people deal with their emotions and mental health issues. “It’s a mobile game and it feels like an interactive comic book, there’s interactive illustrations, puzzles and character dialogues where you choose a conversation option to speak to each of the characters.
“The main subject it deals with is emotional literacy, your ability to recognise your emotions. “It helps kids say to themselves, ok am I stressed, angry or upset and it teaches them different strategies for managing those feelings.
“We’ll launch in Ireland in a test market to see how people react to it and then we’ll try to go global, my partner Aida is Spanish and speaks the language, she’ll translate it into Spanish too.
Rachel said her own personal struggle inspired the game too.
She said: “When I was younger I was diagnosed with ADHD, it affects your self esteem.
“You have problems with your executive functions, you could be really bright, really talented but you struggle with the simple day to day things like finding your keys, you stumble over the basics.
“I was in treatment for an eating disorder too, bulimia, there’s a correlation between women with eating disorders and people with ADHD.
“With low self esteem, you can fall into these traps, but I think it’s really important for people to know you can have a rocky patch with your mental health but if you invest in looking after yourself you can recover from it.
“I’m really glad I came through this and can channel this energy into doing something positive, like creating this game to help young people with their mental health.
“We could write the characters in the game drawing on personal experience and we work with an organisation called Gaming the Mind in the UK, a mixture of doctors and mental health professionals, just to validate our content.
“They told us not to define the three characters that you meet by depression, anxiety and conflict disorders, but rather to talk about them in terms of fear, anger and sadness.
“Someone with depression will recognize themselves in the fear character, the emotions are universal so it opens the game up to everyone, whether you’re sad in the moment or you have more long term problems.
“We also want to couple this game with resources for parents and teachers.”
Working with Sky has been incredible, she adds: “This is the second year Sky have run these tech scholarships to address the gender imbalance in the industry.
“There’s not enough women in the Tech sector and young girls aren’t being drawn towards tech careers when they leave school.
“So Sky’s trying to fund women led tech projects to create more visible female role models in the sector, so that girls can see there are people like me who work in the sector, making it more appealing for them to work in tech.”
Mayo Native Mary Murphy told how being a CEO at 16 came naturally to herself and her twin Sarah.
Mary told the Irish Mirror: “We set up the company when we were 16, the original product we have is for marking sheep and after running into some problems on our own farm we came up with the sheep gun.
“Make a Mark Limited is our company, the product we’re selling at the moment is our sheep marketing gun and we’re in the process of developing some new products.
“We hope to have them in the coming months, the new product we’re focusing on is GPS tracker system for sheep, tracker tags, the idea will help to prevent theft and from predators too.
“We grew up on a cattle and sheep farm in Mayo, from a young age we were out watching mam and dad farming.
“We’re the eldest of six kids so we’ve always been helping on the farm, but it was from running into problems ourselves on the farm that we came up with the ideas that we have.
“All of our products we’ve used on our farm and they were born from practical problems we had.
Mary who’s studying political science and business in UCC added: “The products we have are now being sold in the UK, France and Germany now, so we’re so excited that we’re going international.
“Neither of us have a tech background per se but we are learning every day as to how technology can help on the farm,
“The financial bursary from Sky has meant we could start creating our products and the mentor support has been huge too.”
There’s not enough women in the Tech sector and young girls aren’t being drawn towards tech careers when they leave school