Irreco didn't seem to want to work properly, so I switched to qtirreco and I've just got this working nicely this evening - had to record my own signals too since my tv and dvd player weren't in the remote database.

Had a few problems at first where the signals weren't being sent at all - I was able to check because the IR receiver I have flashes a light whilst it's receiving, but I could've done the view-through-a-digital-camera solution to see if it was transmitting otherwise.
Also, the files in the remote config files needed to be included in /etc/lircd.conf file and because I was transferring them in manually they weren't automatically being added.