It was the wrong wmiirc turns out. I was editing /etc/wmii-hg/wmiirc and I was thinking about how the keybindings aren't the only thing that wasn't working, so I ran a locate on wmiirc and found out I have a /usr/local/etc/wmii-hg/wmiirc. Putting the key bindings in there made them work. But I'm still confused about why they don't work when I put them in wmiirc_local in the local_events() function.
I have a similar problem [1], but only when using dash as the shell. Try another shell if you are using dash. Or use the workaround described in [1].
[1] http://code.google.com/p/wmii/issues/detail?id=229 -- Thomas Dahms
