As it turns out, Empathy doesn’t come with an IRC account support in Ubuntu 12.10. In other words, the new Online Accounts section in Quental lets you connect to Google, Twitter, Jabber and a few other accounts but not IRC. I have no clue what made the packagers take this decision, but it’s a poor move, considering that the plugin only weighs 11.6 kB. Anyway, you can simply install the IRC plugin with the command,
sudo apt-get install account-plugin-irc
There are a few other plugins that do not come pre-installed. You can view them using,
apt-cache search account-plugin