First of all if you want secure private IRC you should be running your own irc daemon (I would reccommend UnrealIRCd).

Second, if you insist on using a public IRC server a much better solution would be to use FiSH encryption (ultrx.net/doc/fish). Distribute the passkey over another channel to the users and you can have secure irc on a public network without even making the channel private. SSL also ceases to matter.