Select statement with town Polish characters

HI,

I'm trying to do a select statement to match the name of a town or district stored in my database, the fields collation is utf8_polish_ci and the name is Łódzkie. When I try and match this to a record in the database it won't product any matches, because it's the way it's stored in the database looks like Ĺ�Ăłdzkie when this is presented in PHP it appears back as Łódzkie, but during the query it's obviously not comparing in it's true form. It there anyway around this?

Thanks,

Gavin