I use a list so that I can know if someone is a mod other then only when they send a message. So I always have a running list of who the mods are and can use the data for later purposes.
For sending IRC messages i use
bot.sendIRC().message(IRC_NAME, message);
Where bot is an instance of a PircbotX object, IRC_NAME is the name of my IRC channel like #riggedbananagaming and message is the String that I want to send. I’m unsure of any other methods that work because I haven’t tried them.