Rather than requiring community members to run a separate IRC client on their machines, provide a new paragraph type in Magnolia that embeds an IRC client in the web interface. This can be done using:

http://webchat.freenode.net/

Click on the IRC icon in the top-left hand corner and choose 'Add webchat to your site' from the dropdown menu. You'll then be taken through a series of steps that produces some HTML to include in the page. We could reproduce these steps in the paragraph configuration dialog and render the resulting HTML with our own styles.