Daniel - it should be public IMO only because you don’t want some lesser experienced operators wandering into these IRC brothels and catching something or worse, giving them something…so to speak. I can wander into any chat really and say I’m vaul pixie and make you do bad things potentially, like make you buy a CB and contact me on ‘secure’ Channel 19 with your name server password so I can ‘help’. That’s ‘bad’, yes yes, digital certs, pgp, etc. All that.
I wouldn’t cry if IRC was deprecated, or archie, or gopher, but…that’ll never happen so better to use education as the ‘jimmy hat’.