I do have some code lying around that is based on Net::IRC. It was pretty nifty, based on coderefs. The code had a certain amount of introspection and if it saw that any of its source files had changed, it would reload them on the fly. If any of the code had problems, it could revert back to the previous version.

I could dig it out if you're really stuck, but the general concensus these days is that IRC bots are better written using POE. The best plan of attack would probably be to investigate POE::Component::IRC.