Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Lordship of Ireland was created in 1177 when Henry II of England granted his son John the title Lord of Ireland at the Oxford parliament in May of that year. It lasted until 1542, when the Crown of Ireland Act transformed it into the Kingdom of Ireland.
The Statute of Kilkenny was passed in 1366 and forbade English settlers in Ireland from adopting Irish law, language, custom, or dress. It was an attempt to stop the cultural blending between Anglo-Norman settlers and the Gaelic Irish, but proved ineffective.
The English Pale was a fortified region on the east coast of Ireland comprising most of counties Dublin, Kildare, Meath, and Louth, where English culture and law were observed. In 1494, Lord Deputy Edward Poynings ordered defensive ditches built around it, and it became the effective limit of direct English rule by the mid-fifteenth century.
Henry VIII sought a new constitutional foundation because the Lordship of Ireland had originally been granted to the Norman monarchy by the Papacy, and Henry had been excommunicated by the Catholic Church. He feared the Holy See could revoke a papal-derived title, so the Irish Parliament passed the Crown of Ireland Act in 1542 to ground his authority in statute rather than papal grant.
The Lordship went into decline following the Scottish invasion by Edward Bruce in 1315-1318, which devastated the economy and coincided with the great famine of 1315-1317. The Black Death of 1348-1350 then struck the town-dwelling Norman population especially hard, and a Gaelic revival gathered force after 1350 as native Irish clans reclaimed territory and power.
John Lackland was the youngest son of King Henry II of England, nicknamed Johan sanz Terre in Norman French because he was initially left without lands to rule. At the age of ten he was made Lord of Ireland in 1177, giving the Lordship its name. When his older brothers died, John became King of England in 1199, folding the Lordship directly under the Angevin crown.