I used to have Xchat on my old 770, and it worked somehow (with quite a few glitches because it wasn't properly hildonized). I'm sad to hear it doesn't even install now... OTOH, i never found it in any repository recenty...

Whatever... I'd also love to see an IRC client again. Pidgin might work (it worked for me on the desktop at least, never tried it on the tablet), it might even be that we'll see IRC in the standard telepathy setup one day, but I never felt IM-clients make good IRC clients. XChat would really be cool, but it really needs some re-work to behave nicely on the tablets. Probably you'd even want to remove some functions in order to streamline it and make for less settings dialogs.