  We consider various ways of treating the infrared divergence which appears in
the dynamically generated fermion mass, when the transverse part of the photon
propagator in N flavour $QED_{3}$ at finite temperature is included in the
Matsubara formalism. This divergence is likely to be an artefact of taking into
account only the leading order term in the $1 \over N$ expansion when we
calculate the photon propagator and is handled here phenomenologically by means
of an infrared cutoff. Inserting both the longitudinal and the transverse part
of the photon propagator in the Schwinger-Dyson equation we find the dependence
of the dynamically generated fermion mass on the temperature and the cutoff
parameters. It turns out that consistency with certain statistical physics
arguments imposes conditions on the cutoff parameters. For parameters in the
allowed range of values we find that the ratio $r=2*Mass(T=0)/critical
temperature$ is approximately 6, consistently with previous calculations which
neglected the transverse photon contribution.
