It's as if a starting gun has gone off in terms of political debate.

Nama has ignited public discussion, the cabinet has had its first post-holiday meeting to kickstart the massive budget cuts arising from Colm McCarthy's Snip Nua, the Lisbon II campaign has begun and the Commission on Taxation report has landed on Brian Lenihan's desk.

It may have been just a week in politics, but these past seven days will reverberate for a long time to come.

Nama has taken particular hold of the public consciousness and it's not just because 46 economists have voiced their misgivings for the government's plans for dealing with the €90bn of impaired debts .

The toxic bank is the stuff of bar-stool talk and dinner-party debate, not because people are confused or don't really understand the way it works, but because they do understand it – and it is making them very worried indeed.

The trouble is, the debate about people's misgivings is starting to take on a Lisbonesque quality because, just as they did over the Lisbon Treaty two years ago, our political leaders are once again failing to engage with people's perfectly justifiable fears.

If ministers don't handle this carefully, there is every chance that Nama rage could leak into votes for the no camp in Lisbon II on 2 October. Where then our access to billions from the European Central Bank?

The likelihood of a yes vote is still very strong, but if all parties really want to guarantee acceptance – and, better still, set up a system for dealing with the banking crisis that the people actually support because they feel it is fair and in their interest – it's vital that our politicians conduct their discussions with an open-mindedness and respect that has been distinctly lacking so far.

At the moment, people feel that an arrogant, "my way or the highway" approach is being taken.

Brian Cowen has said he'll write "whatever cheques are necessary" to ensure financial stability. He may have thought he was being reassuring, if populist. He came across as a white knight for bankers and developers.

After the Gang of 46 academic economists got together and questioned the pricing logic underpinning Nama, the government's own advisor, Alan Ahearne, a man much respected for warning so clinically of the property crash, called them "delusional". In a masterstroke of supercilious arrogance, the Greens' communications minister Eamon Ryan wondered of the dissident economists, "Where were they when the land speculation and flawed macro and micro economic policies which caused the recession were happening?"

As for the minister for finance himself, Brian Lenihan seems so in thrall to his own clever plan that he won't countenance the possibility of a flaw. He is even arguing that the taxpayer may end up paying nothing – not something that a levied, taxed, VAT-ed or worse, unemployed, public is disposed to believe.

This is not the way to win friends or even grudging support for what may or may not be the "best worst" solution to the nation's debt nightmare. People have serious concerns. They are not indulging in obstructive questioning for mischief. They want the consequences of the government's plan teased out in fine detail.

A lot of perfectly valid questions need to be answered. If Nama can only break even if property prices go up, are we stitching house-price inflation into our economic strategy? Will government policy on the property market have to be hitched to the Nama wagon?

Obviously there are arguments about safeguarding the "wealth" of those in negative equity with the needs of first-time buyers; of balancing the prospects of established developers with opportunities for builders starting from scratch. But given that it will own and control one of the single biggest property portfolios in the world, Nama is bound to have a distorting effect on the normal workings of supply and demand as it makes decisions over an unknown number of years about what to sell, what to keep and what to develop.

That brings up the issue of Nama's independence. Labour's Joan Burton has raised serious questions about the minister for finance's powers under the Nama legislation. The lack of transparency in the valuation process and the right of the minister to veto the valuation panel are also of concern. The Labour finance spokesman will raise issues tomorrow when Brian Lenihan addresses a joint Oireachtas committee on finance and he needs to give convincing answers.

A lot of the focus has been on the price being paid for the loan books. Critics question the entire principle of pricing the assets "over time". As the old joke goes, they invented astrology because the economists couldn't get it right.

But there are other practical measures that could be built into the "price" being paid for the loans – and they relate to banking reform .

Firstly and most importantly from the public's point of view, more heads need to roll in the banks so that a complete clear-out of those who made high-level and disastrous lending decisions is seen to be completed.

The government must also insist on far greater reform of the system. If our banks are too big to fail, as this government now seems to think, then checks and balances must be built into the regulatory framework within which they operate.

Consumers must be protected from having to pay on the double for getting the banks working – both as taxpayers and as consumers of banking services through increased fees and interest rates.

From the developers' side too, a fundamental must be an outright ban on insolvent developers being allowed to buy property or land from Nama when it is sold at a knockdown price. If developers who are part of the problem profit from whatever scheme is worked out to deal with toxic loans, revolution will likely form a large part of the Nama portfolio.