On networks that don’t hide your IP or hostname automatically on connect, your IP is exposed for everyone to see and possibly abuse.
Also there are many reasons you might not want to show everyone from what point of the world you are connecting from and/or want to add a little more anonymonity to your online activities.
You can do so by connecting to IRC via TOR – dubbed “The Onion Router” – how exactly that works and is set up is shown in a small tutorial video we’ve put online.
In this video we’ve used a virtual machine running Ubuntu “Karmic Koala” and the IRC-client XChat for our setup – but the same principles apply to any other client or operating systems, although the steps you need to take will differ.
Watching the video in HD for better readability of the on-screen instructions etc. is recommended.
Questions? Comments? Let us know 
Paul says:
Have you tried this recently ?
Each time I try to jump into any IRC network with TOR, I get automatically bounced because the IP used is blacklisted and/or a TOR exit node is detected and IRC forbid me to go on.
You can answer in comments please, the email’s fake and your page exists in first place while search “connect to irc through tor” in the STARTPAGE search.
Regards.
Paul.
phrozen77 says:
That’s an RBL in action – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL
Long story short, if the network you’re trying to connect to won’t allow connections from TOR you won’t be able to connect…
Though some networks (like freenode for example) have special procedures in place to allow connections via TOR – to find out how you need to configure your IRC client to connect to freenode via TOR look there: http://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml#tor