I am starting to develop a comprehensive IRC client module in Perl, with the help of Chris Williams (maintainer of POE::Component::IRC) and Yaakov (of #freenode::perl), among others. There's a page at the #perl Perl Mongers wiki where the specifications for the module will be updated regularly. If you have serious input on the features or capabilities of the module, please reply here or edit the wiki page.

The gist of the module is this. IRC::Client will use P::C::IRC to talk to an IRC server. It will handle the various differences between IRC daemons (like hybrid, asuka, bahamut, etc.). It will have two stub sub-modules, IRC::Client::View and IRC::Client::Control, which deal with displaying the output from the server and getting and sending content from the user. Along with IRC::Client (or rather, shortly after its release) will be IRsCreen, an IRC client using Term::Visual that will provide the power of screen.

The goal of IRC::Client is also to provide an easily extensible base for people to develop their own clients. It will do this through a simple, well-documented interface for the various IRC-related objects it defines.