A tightly-edited, coherent entry today:
An initially unpromising article about ambulance services in the current (print edition) Polityka reveals (apart, of course, from the under-funded mess that Poland has inevitably made of its emergency services) that hospitals in Poland were located not in places determined by the needs of the surrounding civilian population but according to Warsaw pact plans; that is, where the powers-that-were foresaw heavy casualties in the event of NATO invading. (What? NATO invade? Boy were the communists ever wrong about the peace-loving North American Treaty Organisation.)

But this was not just communist paranoia and to-hell-with-the-masses. America�s interstate highway system was built to cope with mass evacuation in the event of a nuclear attack. The botched evacuation of New Orleans suggests that the communist threat may have been no more than a justification for massive state intervention in the automobile industry rather than the spur for developing a meaningful emergency plan. Either that or the plan had not been updated since 1956.

Nor was little “neutral” Ireland untouched by considerations of war and peace, though in the case of Ireland the enemy was within. The hideous University College Dublin campus in Belfield is popularly believed to have been designed to stymie hot-headed sons of strong farmers and future civil servants from rioting. The only flat, open space in the middle of campus is a reservoir for water cannons – sorry, a water feature. The open spaces are broken up by broad, shallow, steps too steep for a wheelchair but shallow enough for an armoured personnel carrier. All this conspires against large gatherings of people, unless the Student Union take it into its head to protest on the football pitches or in the now capacious car parks.

It would be nice to think that more enlightened attitudes prevail today. But, as Paweł Walewski reports, in Poland’s health services the siting of hospitals with accident and emergency wards has in the recent past been dictated more by local officials’ overweening ambitions than by real needs.