After banging my head against the desk trying to figure out how to support multiple remotes (and irexec) for that matter with the newer style kernel based linux ir controller the solution to get things working the old way seems to be:-

1. Load ir-keytable with the LIRC driver e.g.
   

   ir-keytable -c
   ir-keytable -p LIRC
   

   This might as well live in the lirc init script.
   
2. Use the /dev/lirc0 device (on my debian (crunchbang) install in anycase). I don't seem to have needed to specifiy a driver

Mapping lirc to system keymaps (EG. KEY_0) is very limiting if you want multiple remotes on one system. I can see it might be easy for a single remote setup. I'm not sure how irexec is supposed to work though.