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IRC is powered by ngircd, since it's one of the few servers nicely packaged into Debian.
Bitlbee is an IRC → Jabber/Twitter/ICQ/Whatever-else gateway, running on port localhost:6666.
You can auto-connect to bitlbee on startup with these sorts of things in your config:-
servers = ( { address = "localhost"; chatnet = "bitlbee"; port = "6666"; use_ssl = "no"; ssl_verify = "no"; autoconnect = "yes"; },
chatnets = { bitlbee = { type = "IRC"; };
channels = ( { name = "&bitlbee"; chatnet = "bitlbee"; autojoin = "yes"; autosendcmd = "/msg root identify my-secret-identity"; },
There may be a better way to do the last bit, but meh.