Here's a cleanup up patch against default.
However, I don't have any IrDA capable device neither, so I won't be
able to help much. I'll ask on python-dev if someone can help.
As for the manual decoding, AFAICT you'll have the same issue with CAN sockets.
The real question is really "how high-level should the socket module be?".
Because if we added let's say and IRDASocket type, then we could
easily add helper functions to and methods to e.g. list available IrDA
devices, decode fields, etc.
Same thing holds for CAN sockets, and one could imagine we could also
maybe add a MulticastSocket that would make joining/leaving a
multicast group easy (because it is a pain), etc.