Yep: Pidgen has supported IRC so long that back when I was still using it, and the project hadn't yet been renamed from Gaim, it already supported it; it had a few stupidities, and didn't support userhost-masks for buddy bindings (something that simply "makes sense" if you use IRC enough), but it definitely worked and still does (I have friends who use it all the time for IRC, and one who even contributes patches to it).