@dyiing Well I actually got it working.. 🙂
for anyone interested how:
I swapped the sodium version to this:
sodium-fabric-mc1.18.1-0.4.0-alpha6+build.14
and am using this version of IRIS:
iris-mc1.18.1-1.1.5
and it works fine...other than one side issue... Lithium will
not function with this pairing apparently.