Hello,
at the moment, ngircd fails to build against openssl 1.1 since the configure check probes for the SSL_library_init symbol which was removed. Since however ngircd does not use that symbol (and appearently this did not break execution), probing for a different function availabe in both version solves that problem. Was tested (./autogen.sh && ./configure --with-openssl && make) on both Debian jessie (openssl 1.0.2) and stretch with openssl 1.1 installed.
Cheers,
Christoph