  The effects bringing about by the finiteness of the photon mass due to the
Debye screening in the monopole gas in three-dimensional compact QED are
studied. In this respect, a representation of the partition function of this
theory as an integral over monopole densities is derived. Dual formulation of
the Wilson loop yields a new theory of confining strings, which in the
low-energy limit almost coincides with the one corresponding to the case when
the photon is considered to be massless, whereas in the high-energy limit these
two theories are quite different from each other. The confining string mass
operator in the low-energy limit is also found, and its dependence on the
volume of observation is studied.
