All the European EFnet servers joined IRCNet and they were later joined by the EFnet servers in Japan and Australia.
As the new network included the worlds first IRC server, they decided to adopt the name IRCNet which up to that time had been used as a generic name for an IRC network. Prior to this name they were known as the "European EFnet".
IRCNet is currently the second most popular IRC network regularly having over a hundred thousand users.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump