Hi
Your favourite sites would be in your browser cache, so they will always appear to load quickly.
We are peered with most of the main Irish ISPs (see
http://www.inex.ie) so the speed tests are from your PC to our servers.
Without knowing which ISP you are using or which sites you are having issues with there is no way for us to shed any light on the matter for you
I doubt if it's an issue with the speed test itself however, as the only issues we've ever seen are with very high bandwidth connections which are harder to track accurately
Michele