LIRC on CentOS 6

I'm getting a new MythTV frontend up and running on CentOS 6 x86_64. I 
have the LIRC 0.8.7 packages installed:

$rpm -qa |grep lirc
lirc-devices-0.8-4.el6.noarch
lirc-0.8.7-88.el6.x86_64
liblirc_client0-0.8.7-88.el6.x86_64
lirc-kmdl-2.6.32-279.5.1.el6-0.8.7-88.el6.x86_64

When I plug in my receiver, the lirc_mceusb driver is loaded as expected.

The problem is I don't get any of the usual /dev/lirc* entries created.

I see some postings going back to 2006 and 2009 that suggest manually 
creating the files with mknod. I tried a few variations but running 
lircd still complains about communicating with /dev/lirc or whatever I 
put into /etc/sysconfig/lircd.

I've tried removing and reloading the driver with modprobe.

The one file from lirc-devices-0.8-4.el6.noarch in /etc/udev/rules.d is 
definitely there.

Does anyone have any ideas what the problem is?