So on further digging…I’m even more confused. I had a look through the PircBotX event listeners to see if there was anything that was stopping it from responding to messages from the same account but found nothing.
I then went back to the first test bot I’d written using the example code from PircBotX and that actually seemed to work fine. I think the problem is that I was trying to split the functionality so that the display was handled in one class, the event listeners in another and then a main class to actually create an instance of the bot. Somewhere along the line I guess I misinterpreted something and assumed that because it was responding just fine to input from other accounts that it was working fine.
I guess this is what happens when you blindly try and fumble your way through teaching yourself Java. I guess it’s back to the drawing board 
Thank you for the response