Several hundred senior citizens attended a meeting at Reykjavík’s University Cinema yesterday evening in support of a national effort in matters of the aged staged by senior citizens’ groups. Two attendees were evicted from the event after they began shouting derogatory remarks at members of the government, who were there to take part in a panel discussion, Fréttabladid reports in a front-page story.
Stefán Ólafsson, a professor at the University of Iceland, gave a talk in which he stated that the conditions of the aged and disabled in Iceland had been shunned in the economic upswing that has characterized Icelandic society in the past few years. Pensioners had fallen behind and their tax payments increased over the past decade. Ólafur Ólafsson, former Surgeon-General and the chairman of the Senior Citizens’ Association of Iceland, says that potential support for a senior’s political party is currently being looked into.
Meanwhile, an outreach program has been launched by the Reykjavík Welfare Council to find seniors who live in isolation. This comes in the wake of several incidents over the past few years in which senior citizens have been found dead in their homes after lengthy periods.
