Comment 3 for bug 65174

Adding a kernel-tracking "lirc-modules" package has been proposed to the kernel team, and perhaps in future versions of Ubuntu, lirc will be included in the kernel rebuild process. For the time being, using "m-a" should be used to rebuild the modules as needed:
  sudo m-a -v -t prepare
  sudo m-a -v -t build lirc-modules
  sudo m-a -v -t install lirc-modules