I've been playing a bit with GNU Screen and start-stop-daemon today, trying to rewrite the irssi init.d script (which allows me to run irssi within GNU Screen upon boot).

When it comes down to IRC clients, there's not many that can be compared to flexibility and extendibility provided by irssi (http://irssi.org/), an excellent terminal-based client, which combined with the GNU Screen (http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/) can provide constant presence on IRC channels of any network (provided that you have a constantly working server/desktop connected to the Internet).