If you are comparing apples to apples, then you should be comparing the number of Catholics to Muslims, which is a much smaller gap.

Of course, you would object that when the IRA was blowing up public spaces, that they don't represent all Catholics, but only a subset of them. Certainly, trying to taint all Catholics would that brush would be ignorant and bigoted. I quite agree. Labeling an entire religion as abhorrent just because of the actions of a small percentage of its believers would be absurd.