In setting up a buildbot master, and, reading some documentation, noticed that it has tons of status plugins, one of which is an IRC bot.
Before anything else, you need TwistedWords, an instant-messaging library. So I had to go ahead, download and install it.
cd tmp
lftpget -c http://tmrc.mit.edu/mirror/twisted/Words/8.1/TwistedWords-8.1.0.tar.bz2
tar jxvf TwistedWords-8.1.0.tar.bz2
cd TwistedWords-8.1.0
python setup.py install
Once installed, all I had to do is to make a 2-line change to the buildbot master's master.cfg config file
from buildbot.status import words
c['status'].append(words.IRC('irc.mozilla.org', 'thunderbot', ['maildev']))
Next thing you know, you've got an IRC bot announcing builds, and you can even ask for new builds straight from an irc /msg, cool.
