An international underwater search team will visit the Midlands next week to search for the Lough Ree monster. The team of three, Swede Jan Sundberg, Norwegian Espen Samuelsen and Nick Sucik, a US marine and authority on Irish lake monsters, will look for both skeleton remains and giant eels.
They are also interested in documenting accounts of sightings of strange, monster-like animals in the area.
The team, which is known as Gust - Global Underwater Search Team - will examine reports that the monster may have been a giant eel, or horse eel, as they were known.
The fabled horse eels have reportedly been sighted in the waterways of Ireland. The team will spend a week at Killinure Point in Co Westmeath and will also travel throughout the island looking for fossilised remains or any other evidence of horse eels.
They will be using equipment that detects underwater disturbances of the type made by large mammals. According to Mr Sundberg, there is a good possibility of horse eels in Irish lakes. "The description of these creatures are very much the same as those in Scandinavia - an eel or snake-like animal, three to 10 metres long, evenly thick and muscular. It has the ability to move over land, from lake to lake, and could be aggressive."
In the past Gust has searched for the Loch Ness monster and intends searching the Lough Ree lake bed for evidence of large serpent-like creatures which have been the subject of sightings for hundreds of years. Witnesses claim the monster's body loops out of the water when it swims, and is at least six feet long with a relatively small 18-inch head.
A claim of a sighting was made in comparatively recent times, in 1960, by three Catholic priests. Fathers Richard Quigley, Matthew Burke and Daniel Murray were fishing on Lough Ree when one of them claims to have spotted a large black animal swimming up the lough.
The creature rose and fell beneath the surface, forming a loop as it travelled. Sightings of monsters in Lough Ree date from St Mochua of Balla's reference to a fierce monster said to live in the lake.
The team's approach of lowering listening devices into Loch Ness won it critical acclaim from the scientific community. One special sequence excited Gust, which it says sounded precisely like large bodies propelled by large flippers, moving through the water.
Analysis would suggest the movements resembled a plesiosaur - a legendary aquatic creature. A marine reptile, the plesiosaur lived in the sea, not in freshwater lakes, but fossils from plesiosaurs have been found in Scotland, the group claims.
A number of books, including Lake Monsters of Ireland and In the Domain of Lake Monsters by John Kirk, feature the Lough Ree monster.
There are also a number of web pages devoted to the monster, including http://www.ultranet.ca/ bcscc/irish.htm and http:// www.cling.gu.se/damien/ Athlone-Glasson.html
The Global Underwater Search Team website is at www.gust.st
The Gust expedition has been sponsored by tourism companies Killinure Chalets, Waveline Cruisers and the ferry company DFDS Seaways.