Oh YES! You beat me to it. I was just thinking the same thing when I read post #6. Also, I seem to remember something about "the inquisition" as well when protestants were tortured and put to horrible deaths for something as innocent as possessing and reading a Bible or daring to worship the All Mighty God differently than the Catholic Magisterium dictated.
You’re “remembering” things that never actually happened, then. Does your “memory” include the hundreds of Catholics executed under Elizabeth and James I in England whose “crime” amounted to nothing more than hearing Mass and shielding priests from certain death so that they could?
Actually the IRA wasn’t Catholic in the sense it was there to fight for the Church. It was largely staffed by Catholics but some of the patron saints, if you’ll forgive the term, were Protestant such as Wolfe Tone. In the early 20th century there were also Protestant leaders such as the Countess Markievicz, Sam Maguire, Roger Casement, Erskine Childers,etc.
Everyone likes to trot out the IRA as a Christian or Catholic version Al Qaeda when in reality the Catholic Church was largely opposed to it. I remember reading threats from the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland that IRA members would be denied Catholic burials. The reason given is that there was no hope of military success against the might of the British Empire and thus the struggle against them didn’t match the requirements of the Church’s doctrine regarding a Just War (no hope of success). That being the case the view of some priests was that Catholics participating in the IRA could be considered to be murderers. I don’t think these threats were ever carried out but there was a tremendous opposition by the Church to Irish militant nationalism during its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Past the 20s into the 1960s while the organization became more Catholic in membership they descended into Socialist political theory. Had they ever gained supremacy in Ireland I believe that they would have been as pro-Church as the communist party in Poland. The IRA in the 60s and 70s through today ended up being true believers, but largely believers in Marx and other left wing baloney.