> "but I haven't found anything better than IRC for chat"
If IRC was your best bet so far, you might want to have a look at good ol' XMPP aka Jabber. If you're into Android, with Conversations [0] there's a suitable client which supports end-to-end encryption. For other OS there are many other choices with different encryption options. While OTR (Off-The-Record Messaging) might be the most popular one, it unfortunately makes multi-device-support kind of a bumpy experience.
If IRC was your best bet so far, you might want to have a look at good ol' XMPP aka Jabber. If you're into Android, with Conversations [0] there's a suitable client which supports end-to-end encryption. For other OS there are many other choices with different encryption options. While OTR (Off-The-Record Messaging) might be the most popular one, it unfortunately makes multi-device-support kind of a bumpy experience.
[0] https://conversations.im/