Using Colloquy on the iPhone in a channel in which most people
speak Swedish using utf-8, but some still use iso-8859-1 (latin-1),
colloquy does not display any messages containing non ascii chars
coded with iso-8859-1 at all. And it's very common since Swedish uses
ÅÄÖ and åäö all the time.
Of course, iso-8859-1 isn't valid utf-8, but the best way to handle
such a message is that if an invalid utf-8 sequence is encountered,
treat the whole message as iso-8859-1 (or maybe iso-8859-15 to get the
€ symbol as well), do a quick convert and then display it, taking
care not to display non printable chars like 0x00-0x1F and 0x80-0x9F.
This is what many other irc clients do.
It should probably be a very easy fix, and it would help a lot.
I'm not sure if this is in the GUI or IRC Core. Version is r70.