Matt Talbot went to work at twelve as a messenger for a wine merchant and was drinking heavily within the year. For sixteen years he drank everything he earned, pawned his boots for it, and once stole a fiddle from a blind street musician to sell for drink — the incident he spoke of afterwards with most shame. In 1884, at twenty-eight, standing outside a pub where the men he had bought drink for all week would not buy him one, he went home, told his mother he was taking the pledge, and took it for three months. At the end of three months he took it for six. Then for life. He kept it for forty years.
What he did with those forty years was nothing anyone would have noticed. He worked as a hod-carrier and then in a timber yard, rose before five for Mass, gave away most of his wages, read the Fathers and Newman with a labourer's schooling, and slept on a plank with a block of wood for a pillow. He was a member of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and came out with the rest of the men in the Dublin Lockout of 1913, taking no strike pay he had not earned.
He collapsed in Granby Lane on Trinity Sunday, 7 June 1925, on his way to Mass, and died in the street; nobody at the hospital knew who he was. When they undressed the body they found a chain wound round his waist and more chains on an arm and a leg, which is how Dublin learned what he had been doing. Paul VI declared him Venerable on 3 October 1975. He is claimed, more than any other figure in the calendar, by people trying to stop drinking, and his cause has never advanced past that decree.