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Matthew Talbot was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 2 May 1856, the second son of Charles and Elizabeth Talbot, in a poor working-class Catholic family that grew to twelve children. His father and several brothers drank heavily, and the household knew both want and the effects of alcohol. Talbot received only a brief elementary schooling before leaving around the age of twelve to work. He was employed first as a messenger boy, including for a wine merchant, and then in a bottling store, where he began to drink. By his mid-teens he was an alcoholic. He later worked as an unskilled labourer, including at Dublin Port and on building sites. He spent his wages in public houses, pawned clothes and tools, and at times stole in order to obtain drink. For some sixteen years addiction dominated his life in the tenements of nineteenth-century Dublin.

In 1884, at the age of twenty-eight, after a publican refused him credit when he had no money left, Talbot resolved to change. He went to Holy Cross College at Clonliffe and took a three-month pledge of total abstinence, which he later renewed for life; from that time he never drank again. He rebuilt his days around Mass, prayer, and the sacraments, rising early, remaining long in church, and going frequently to confession and Communion. He taught himself to read in order to use Scripture and spiritual books. In 1890 he was received into the Third Order of Saint Francis. He lived alone in a small north-inner-city tenement room (for many years at Upper Rutland Street), slept on a wooden plank with a block for a pillow, fasted severely, and practised hidden corporal penances, including chains and cords worn against the body, which became known only after his death. He gave away most of his modest wages to the poor and to religious houses. He continued as a labourer at the timber firm of T. and C. Martin on the North Wall, where he was known as quiet, regular, and devout. He never married and had no children.

On Trinity Sunday, 7 June 1925, Talbot collapsed and died of heart failure on Granby Lane in Dublin while walking to Mass at the Dominican church of St Saviour's. He was sixty-nine. Those who prepared his body found the penitential chains. He was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. In 1972 his remains were translated to a tomb in the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes on Seán McDermott Street, Dublin, which has become a place of pilgrimage. The cause for his canonisation was introduced in the Archdiocese of Dublin. On 3 October 1975 Pope Paul VI declared that he had practised virtue to a heroic degree, conferring the title Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonised; a miracle formally attributed to his intercession would still be required for beatification.

Because of the length of his addiction and the completeness of his conversion to sobriety and prayer, Talbot has been widely invoked as a patron of alcoholics and of people seeking recovery from addiction. Prayer groups, hostels, and recovery centres bearing his name exist in Ireland and in other countries. His life is often presented as that of an ordinary labourer who, without office or formal learning, pursued a hidden ascetic life in an industrial city. Devotion to him remains especially strong in Dublin and among Catholic temperance and recovery movements.

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