Satisfying the users’ increasing demand and reducing the networks’ energy consumption are among the most critical requirements of future cellular networks. In this paper, we exploit Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRSs) to reduce the bandwidth required by users, which will allow more users to be served and/or reduce the energy footprint of cellular base stations. In contrast to most of the existing studies that focus on configuring the phase shifts of IRSs and/or the active beamforming of the base station, we consider that the IRS consists of blocks of resources that can be shared by several users. We formulate the problem of managing these resources as nonlinear integer problem. Then, we solve the optimization problem using exhaustive search, and propose two low complexity heuristic algorithms. The performance of the system is evaluated considering variable number of users, position of IRS, required bit rate and radius of the cell. Results show that using IRS can achieve significant bandwidth savings and important energy demand reduction when the IRS resources are well managed.