Having a persistent IRC client

I would like to have an IRC client (running on a server that I have SSH access to) be persistent on the server without disconnecting from the rooms and servers I joined. In other words, I want to be able to SSH into a server, check messages on the IRC client, disconnect from the SSH server, without ever leaving the chatrooms. How can I achieve that? I'm using irssi and thought about somehow nohup'ing it, but I can't see how that would work.