I tried rebooting, no joy yet.

I uninstalled everything using the IR port and rebooted. Then i did a fresh install of raemote. This time it did not show up in the widget menu so i ran the script

python /usr/lib/hildon-desktop/raemote.py &

and i got

~ $ Stopping lirc daemon: irexec lircmd lircd.
Starting lirc daemon: lircd

The widget appears on the desktop but IR is non-functional
When I try to use it, terminal gives me,

irsend: could not connect to socket
irsend: connection refused

so its a socket connection problem. Off to google it now.