Comment 3 for bug 1048024

Searching for IRC does not list a bunch of relevant IRC application. E.g Irssi and Weechat is not listed in the search result.

Even worse, IRC support is not installed by default in Empathy in 12.10 (this should probably be a seperate bug report)

Is IRC support available in Empathy in 12.10?
e@B570e:~$ apt-cache search account-plugin-irc
account-plugin-irc - Messaging account plugin for IRC

Is it installed?
e@B570e:~$ dpkg -l | grep account-plugin-irc
e@B570e:~$

This is bad.