Bitlbee is an IRC → Jabber/Twitter/ICQ/Whatever-else gateway, running on port localhost:6666.

• A reasonable terse guide to getting going: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bitlbee
• More in-depth: http://wiki.redbrick.dcu.ie/mw/Bitlbee

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.