Hi,
As you know that the uart can transmit irDa signal from it's Uartx_TX pin, which is a bit stream modulated by the 38KHz signal, the 38khz fixed duty cycle signal can be generated by uart module itself. If you want LPC uart_rx pin to receive the irDa signal, I suppose that you have to create an analog low-pass filter circuit to remove the 38K modulated signal, then use uart_RX pin to receive the filtered data stream.
For the EXTINT pin, it is an input pin, which can accept external signal to fire interrupt.
If I misunderstand you, I am sorry.
BR
XiangJun Rong