Since anyone can look over your shoulder and see your screen, and also anyone can torture you into giving up your passwords and log files, all encryption is worthless, and actually worse than no encryption at all since it gives you a false sense of security.
This is essentially the line of reasoning I'm seeing employed in this blog post.
SSL is valuable on IRC solely for letting you authorize with NickServ. If you are at a developer conference on the conference wifi, you would be foolish to connect to IRC sans-SSL and authorize with NickServ, especially if you owned any channels. If you blindly accept an unverified cert, that's your problem, but don't take SSL away from me because some people don't understand certificates.
This is essentially the line of reasoning I'm seeing employed in this blog post.
SSL is valuable on IRC solely for letting you authorize with NickServ. If you are at a developer conference on the conference wifi, you would be foolish to connect to IRC sans-SSL and authorize with NickServ, especially if you owned any channels. If you blindly accept an unverified cert, that's your problem, but don't take SSL away from me because some people don't understand certificates.