No, it's all automatic, but the core is IRCv3 so some knowledge of IRC is good to have for some more advanced features like channel registration and moderation.

But yes, you can create a channel though the Matrix portal and then share the link to it to IRC and XMPP users, just the syntax for these links is somewhat different for each protocol. Ideally, I could modify the XMPP invite portal (similar to matrix.to but easier to modify) to also work for Matrix and the IRC web-client, but so far they are separate.